Lucila Melania Dutan, whose middle name graces the awning, runs the restaurant with the help of her children, Jennifer, Alex and Nestor Jazmani Dutan, along with their half sister, GiGi Gonzalez. The elder Ms. Dutan grew up in the small town of Biblián in the southern province of Cañar, at an altitude close to 9,000 feet. Her roots are in the indigenous Cañari tribe, who lived in the Andes for thousand of years, following the lunar calendar and building temples to the moon, before the sun-worshipping Incas arrived in the late 15th century.
She and her former husband, Luis Nestor Dutan, were among many Ecuadorean immigrants who came to New York in the 1980s from Cañar and neighboring Azuay Province after the price of oil — Ecuador’s largest export — fell. They opened a restaurant, Rincón Latino, in Sunnyside, and fed their fellow Ecuadoreans and neighbors for more than two decades before closing it in 2011.
The new restaurant shares the welcoming spirit of its predecessor, as well as the chef, José Luis Herrera, who comes from Mexico but has cooked Ecuadorean food for decades. Occasional contributions come from other members of the Dutan family: humitas, sweet tamales; pan de trigo, a wheat loaf; and ají, a hot sauce that weds chile to sweet-tart tomate de arból.
The fruit also shows up in dessert, poached in its own juices, ever so slightly tempered by an accompanying scoop of vanilla ice cream. And on the side, a staple of Ecuadorean childhood: Amor cookies, thin waffle wafers spackled together with vanilla cream. They crack smartly and make you nostalgic, wherever you’re from.
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