#mike vickie beef continues

[st-twitter-sillies]

hi, im eden

[brido]

Mike and Vicky Go to Ecuador (Day 2)

What’s the best meal you’ve ever had in your life? Like, if you take into account the fancy cuisine or the company you kept or the surrounding ambience, you probably have a few contenders in your mind. Before this trip, I knew the best food week I’d ever had. My sister visited L.A. in May and her pre-trip Googling of “Best Restaurants in Los Angeles” led to a week of us dining out at Redbird, Officine Brera, A.O.C., the Bazaar by Jose Andres, A-Frame by Roy Choi, Villa Blanca, Night + Market Song and Broken Spanish in that order. None of which I deserved to have at all. But I think all that might have been topped on Day 2 in Ecuador by one trip to the absolute middle of nowhere. But first, we’d have to brave the treacherous altitudes and impending danger of one of the world’s tallest active volcanos. 

In the morning, the fam hopped back in the van (this time joined by one of my sister’s co-workers and her daughter) to head out from Quito to Cotopaxi National Park. It’s the second-most popular national park in Ecuador after the Galapagos Islands. And it’s home to the very tall (19,347 feet) and very active Cotopaxi volcano. Along the way, we picked up an interesting-smelling tour guide to tell us all about it. He even managed to slide in the fact that, who knows, it might even go off during the tour!    

I have to give an A+ to our guide. First of all, he only spoke Spanish and Quechua, so we made do with the Spanish while my sister rapidly translated into English. That made for some unintentionally hilarious moments. Most memorably, as he was showing us how lava melts glaciers and then creates devastating mudslides in the area, he threw in a fun fact about how Spanish conquistadors felt scandalized by llamas because they mated like humans.

I made him pause and go back to that.

As he continued matter-of-factly in Spanish and the oblivious kids screamed amongst each other in the background, my sister was forced to say, in the heightened pace of a professional translator, “Apparently… llamas kiss on the neck… and… the Spanish… also raped the llamas.” Holy shit. Maybe I need to reread that chapter in Jared Diamond or Howard Zinn. A quick Google fact check of the llama mating makes for some imagery you can never unsee. But the gist is that they mate about exactly how you’d think they would. Except in a much-hotter seated position. And for 20-45 minutes. Just don’t look it up if you’re a battle-hardened, smallpox-riddled and/or horny Christian soldier.  

The guide had too many facts, really. He showed us layers of ash still left over from Cotopaxi’s last eruption in 2015, aka the reason my sister and her family couldn’t attend my wedding. He implored us to eat llama meat instead of beef because of its healthier protein and the bovine methane gas (“Cow farts are responsible for 80% of global warming”). He showed us horrible-smelling and hallucinogenic plants. He told us the indigenous Mother God would warm our hands after touching said plants if we lifted them to the sky (and it was much weirder when that actually happened). 

We saw the base camp where climbers get acclimated to the 12,500 foot altitude before going up another 7000 feet. We learned about Ecuador’s Avenue of Volcanoes. We learned about the endangered Andean condor and it’s ten-foot wingspan and life of detrimental monogamy. We learned about the Chalupas supervolcano that could potentially murder everyone in Ecuador. And we learned about the severely unfortunate town of Latacunga, which, over the centuries, has been repeatedly destroyed by earthquakes and mudslides. When someone asked why people would still live there, the guide paraphrased the 19th Century Prussian explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, by saying, “Ecuadorians are strange and unique beings. They cheer up with sad music and sleep peacefully amid smoking volcanoes.” Like I said, he was an A+.    

The guide left us at the high-altitude (12,800 ft) Laguna de Limpiopungo and we continued on our van trek, through fields of volcanic boulders, crustose lichens that eat those boulders and a team of wild horses, to find our lunch destination. Our only hold-up was a small group of locals blocking the road to pick wild blueberries in preparation for the Ecuadorian All Soul’s Day tradition of colada morada and t’ants wawa, or dead baby bread. But I’ll get back to that on another day. The one thought that kept going through my mind on the drive was that we’d all entered an alien planet and that the altitude would age us 23 Earth years like that gravity planet on Interstellar. Luckily, much like my park guide, my science was a little off.

Our lunch destination was Chilcabamba Mountain Lodge in Pedregal, which is an area some dude in the New York Times said was one of the 52 places to go in 2017. So I only have 51 to go in the next two months (here I come, Langtang Region, Nepal!). And awaiting us at Chilcabamba was ten courses of pure awesomeness that put most every other pathetic eating experiences I’ve had in my life to shame. I should probably rephrase that as not to offend anyone close to me. It’s probably fair to say that I mainly eat like Slimer from Ghostbusters. And I do know some excellent cooks in my personal life. I’m just saying that this was probably better.    

The chef was my new pal, Alvaro Reinoso Carvalho, a hunky 30-something Ecuadorian/Brazilian who has studied at world class restaurants in Sao Paulo and Girona, Spain. Maybe it had something to do with all the wine consumption at 13,000 feet, but he really gave my sister’s co-worker the ooh-la-la’s and she started feeling like a Spaniard experiencing a llama for the first time. I can’t really blame her. If I was smart and knew how to do things, I’d sign him and rep him and turn him into a celebrity chef in America like I was Shep Gordon. Then I’d retire to my mansion in Hawaii, throwing dinner parties and being sad I never made babies. Which is still a possibility, I guess. Gotta get on that.    

A small part of what made this special, besides the everything, was that nobody is really ever going to have this experience again. Chef Alvaro is getting a new restaurant “by the McDonalds” in the hipster-ish Quito suburb of Cumbaya. I would have advised him to hold out for a better offer. An offer that includes my retirement in Hawaii. Hey, I’ve watched enough Chef’s Table episodes on Netflix to know what I’m talking about.

Speaking of which, the Chef’s Table episodes I’m specifically thinking about are Dan Barber’s farm to table thing in New York and Francis Mallmann’s isolated, cult-like hippie bullshit in Patagonia. Like, Chef Alvaro seriously made the cheese we ate in the afternoon that morning. He also caught the fish in our sixth course that morning. And probably chopped some fucking wood and foraged some wild Andean mountain truffles or invented some new kind of honey or some shit. The dude was a gorgeous magician.

On top of all of that, and possibly because it was a Sunday, we were absolutely the only people at the entire lodge. We had the whole place to ourselves. Just my crew from the van, Chef Alvaro and a lady helping out who made spaghetti for the kids. I guess the intimacy did lead to a few embarrassing interactions. I tried to impress Chef Alvaro by telling him I’d eaten at the Bazaar by Jose Andres in Beverly Hills one time. I also said things like, “What do you think of elBulli?” while he smiled politely and said, “Ah yes, Ferran Adria.” Because I’m a fucking dope. But I had to let him know I knew my way around the world of celebrity chefs. Because Hawaii.

After dinner our rugged van group got to explore the rugged grounds all to our rugged selves. And the only thing that could have made it any more perfect of an experience was if the stupid clouds hadn’t obscured actual Cotopaxi volcano for most of the day. Probably because the Spanish persecuted the Mother God too (those goddamn Spaniards). But with heavy food comas and heads woozy from the altitude, we piled back into the van and made our way back to Quito. Thus concluded Day 2.

Day 1.