What Manabí left behind, told by those who were there

When I arrived at Iche, the sun was beginning to set among the trees of San Vicente, in Manabí. I had climbed the stairs leading to the complex, passed under an arch of palm trees and discovered a landscape that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. Behind me, small pieces of shell hanging from a tree swayed in the wind. In front of me were a school, a restaurant and a project that was turning Manabí’s gastronomy into an international meeting point.

I had come to work on communications for the Americas Young Chef Award, which from October 7 to 13, 2026 brought together young cooks from different countries of the continent in Manta, Bahía de Caráquez and San Vicente. I did not yet know that, over the following days, I would end up translating in a kitchen for an American participant who had had a difficult night, talking about science and food with a Harvard researcher and discovering how much a territory can tell through its food.

The sunset on that arrival was hard to forget. The sky blended orange and blue tones over an expanse of vegetation that seemed endless. A huge tree near the entrance shaded a couple of chairs from which you felt like staying to contemplate the horizon.

But the most interesting thing about Iche lay beyond the landscape.

Its facilities bring together a restaurant, a gastronomy school and spaces devoted to culinary research and innovation, as well as a vegetable garden. Its approach starts from an idea with much broader implications: recognizing the value of Manabí cooking and turning that knowledge into training and development opportunities for the territory.

During the gathering, young cooks, researchers and international specialists shared experiences around gastronomy, food heritage and innovation. And behind those conversations were stories that would hardly fit into the official program of a competition.

A gecko in the kitchen

Landen Hickman had come from the United States to compete. His participation was marked by several setbacks: some of his ingredients did not arrive on time, and the night before the competition he felt unwell and had to rest.

Even so, the next day he was in the kitchen. I was assigned to help him with translation, because he needed to communicate with the local team. From there I was able to accompany part of his preparation and watch how he faced a day that, after everything that had happened, was already demanding enough.

Then, while he was arranging his utensils, a gecko appeared next to his workstation. Landen stopped what he was doing for a moment, picked it up carefully in his hands, looked at it, smiled and went out to the patio. There he left it on the grass, took a photograph of it and came back to continue his preparation.

It all happened in a few minutes. There was no annoyance and no drama. Just a simple gesture of respect toward a small animal that had appeared where no one expected it. I was struck by the way he acted. Sometimes the smallest details reveal aspects of a person that rarely come up in a conversation.

Landen also chose to work with Ecuadorian ingredients and to use the Manabí wood-fired stove, a traditional cooking tool whose history is closely tied to the food practices of the province.

Traditionally, this stove brings together clay, ceramics and ash around the wood fire. Its importance, beyond preparing food, is that it gathers knowledge about handling fire, materials and culinary techniques that have been passed down through generations.

Seeing an international participant bring this tool into a contemporary competition showed how tradition can enter into dialogue with innovation without losing its identity.

The wealth that begins before the dish

In Ecuador we know that Manabí is one of the great references of our gastronomy. Its dishes and its use of peanuts, green plantain, seafood and its cheeses are part of a widely recognized culinary identity. However, traveling through the territory reveals that behind those flavors there is a much more complex network of knowledge and trades.

A visit to the Playita Mía seafood market, in Manta, was enough to prove it.

The variety of products was impressive: octopus, huge squid, shrimp and prawns that seemed to approach the size of a face. At the stalls, seafood filled the space with an abundance that is hard to appreciate in the same way when it arrives served at the table.

That scene also invited us to look at those who sustain that wealth: fishermen, merchants and families who are part of the province’s food chain. They are joined by Manabí’s traditional cooks, women who have preserved techniques and recipes through everyday practice. Their knowledge is an essential part of the local gastronomic heritage. That relationship between territory and knowledge is one of the aspects of Iche that interested me most.

Its vegetable garden, its cellar and its gastronomic spaces are part of an approach that seeks to experiment with local ingredients without severing them from their origin. Even the cocktail program incorporates local products in preparations that explore other flavor possibilities.

During a meal at Iche I tried a caldo de bolas de verde, a green plantain dumpling soup. It was one of those dishes that remind you why traditional Ecuadorian cooking is so capable of surprising without the need for great artifice. Innovation does not necessarily mean replacing the familiar. It can also mean researching its possibilities, recovering techniques and finding new ways to share them.

The people behind the knowledge

One of the researchers who caught my attention most was Mexican chef Lalo Plascencia, international judge of the Americas Young Chef Award and panelist at the Gastronomic Research Meeting. He approaches gastronomy through research and reflection, with a curiosity that tends to lead conversations toward broader questions about food and culture. He has a particular way of explaining complex concepts, sometimes from almost philosophical perspectives, but without losing his humor or warmth.

Talking with him was especially interesting because of his view of Ecuador. From his experience, he recognized the value of our products and gastronomic knowledge, as well as the possibilities that still exist to give them greater international visibility.

I was also able to talk with Pia Sörensen, lecturer in Harvard University’s Science & Cooking program, international judge of the Americas Young Chef Award and panelist at the Gastronomic Research Meeting. Before meeting her I imagined a much more formal conversation. Instead, I found an approachable person, interested in listening and sharing experiences. We talked naturally, exchanged questions, and the conversation flowed without her academic career imposing any distance.

Gastronomy has that ability to bring together, in the same conversation, people who come from very different disciplines, countries and experiences.

I also saw it with the young participants.

Jovan William, a contestant from Martinique, invited me to taste his preparation. It was a chance to get closer to his culinary proposal through a direct exchange with the person who had made it. At another moment, Erecia Hepburn, mentor of Dedrick Taylor Jr., a contestant from the Bahamas, gave me some coins from her country. An unexpected detail that became another memory of the exchanges that arose during those days.

Francisco Guitard, observer for the United States team, for his part traveled to Montecristi in search of ceramic pieces and toquilla straw to present the dish in the competition. His journey showed how a gastronomic proposal can connect with the crafts and other knowledge of the place that hosts it.

At the Valentina Colibrí restaurant, run by Gloria Chávez and her daughters, we shared dishes of Manabí cooking while traditional dances from northern Manabí were performed, another example of how cooking and other cultural expressions of the province can meet in a single experience. Not all cultural connections need grand speeches. Sometimes they begin with an ingredient, a dish someone offers you to taste or an object that travels from one country to another.

A corviche by the sea

Between the workdays and the activities of the gathering, there was an afternoon when we ended up doing something quite simple: sitting by the sea.

There were five of us. Among them were Lalo Plascencia and Francisco Guitard, the two international visitors in the group. We had spent much of our time between gastronomic activities and decided to take the opportunity to try something that could not be missed on the coast: corviche and emborrajado.

Earlier we had had lunch at the Casa Rosada restaurant, in Manta, where we tried several dishes, including a corviche. Then, on El Murciélago beach, we tried the version sold by the sea. The contrast between the two was striking, but both had their charm. I like that aspect of gastronomy: the same dish can change depending on who makes it, where it is sold and what story lies behind its recipe.

That day I also took a few minutes to walk along the beach.

It had been a long time since I had felt the sea and, although I was in Manabí for work, I did not want to leave without doing it. I took off my shoes and walked to where the waves reached. It was around four in the afternoon. Birds moved along the shore and the water advanced gently until it covered my feet before returning to the sea. It was just a few minutes to take in the landscape, feel the water and enjoy being there.

Sometimes the clearest memories of a trip appear precisely in those pauses.

Ecuador is also told through its cooking

I have had the opportunity to get to know the gastronomy of other countries, and I enjoy discovering how people eat, what ingredients they use and what stories lie behind their recipes.

But Ecuadorian cooking keeps surprising me. We are a small country with extraordinary food diversity. The dishes of the Coast, the Highlands, the Amazon and Galápagos let you travel through traditions, products and ways of understanding food that change radically from one region to another. That wealth has stayed with me even when I am far from Ecuador.

In Turkey I made a seco de pollo, a chicken stew, for someone who had never tried our food. I remember their curiosity as they watched the process and their surprise at discovering the flavor of the dish. In New York I cooked a locro de papa, a potato soup, even though I did not have all the ingredients I would have wanted. And in India, when I was asked to prepare something Ecuadorian, I improvised a vegetarian option with green plantain and a mushroom sauce.

None of those dishes claimed to represent our entire gastronomy. They were small ways of sharing it. But it made me happy to see that a dish could spark curiosity about a country that some of those people did not yet know.

That same motivation is what led me to accept the invitation from María Alexandra Benalcázar, production coordinator of the Americas Young Chef Award, to join the communications team for the gathering. We had already worked together and, when she told me about the project, I saw an opportunity to help show Ecuador through one of its most valuable heritages. During those days I also worked alongside people who made the activities possible, among them Rebeca Donoso, of the hospitality team, whose willingness and companionship were an important part of the experience.

My work involved communications, public relations and coordinating media and content needs. But being close to the activities allowed me to observe situations that do not always appear in the official photographs or in the results of a competition. The story of Landen and the gecko was one of them.

A conversation worth continuing

The Americas Young Chef Award brought together in Manabí international participants and specialists who came to exchange knowledge about gastronomy. But the value of an experience like this also lies in what happens around the competition: in the conversations with the cooks, in the work of the women who preserve traditional recipes, in the markets, in ancestral techniques and in the curiosity of those who discover ingredients they had never tasted before.

Iche is an interesting initiative because it connects those dimensions with training, research and opportunities for territorial development. I am happy that Manabí has a project of this kind. And I would like there to be more initiatives capable of researching, preserving and projecting the gastronomic wealth of other Ecuadorian regions.

We have stories, ingredients, techniques and people that deserve a much greater presence in the international gastronomic conversation. To achieve this we need more consistent and ambitious communication, capable of building experiences, creating content and connecting audiences with those who make our cooking possible.

I also believe that we Ecuadorians ourselves have a lot to discover. Sometimes we look for extraordinary experiences in other countries without fully knowing what exists within our own borders. From Manabí I take away new flavors, conversations, lessons and people who made this experience special. But above all, I take away the satisfaction of having helped, through my work, other people get to know Ecuador a little better.

Because every dish can open a conversation, every ingredient can tell a story and every encounter can become an opportunity to bring our country closer to the world.

Taking part in the Gastronomic Research Meeting, held at Iche, San Vicente, alongside the Americas Young Chef Award (October 9 to 12, 2026), reminded me how much we can build through collaboration. It was enriching to hear leading figures from different disciplines share their projects and experiences. I invite you to look up their profiles and explore their work. What a satisfaction to recognize that Ecuador has so much to contribute: a gastronomic wealth, products, knowledge and talent that deserve to be better known, inside and outside the country!

The Meeting reminded me how important it is to be curious and to question ourselves, even when something turns out well. To ask, to listen and to seek to understand the why of things. Cooking lets us blend alchemy, everyday life and ideas into a product full of processes worth understanding.

I enjoyed the generosity of the panelists. Listening to them, tasting the products and understanding their processes made science feel closer. It was wonderful to meet people I admire and to see that they still deserve that admiration for how human and consistent they proved to be during the Meeting.

I keep an idea left by Diego Gutiérrez, executive chef of Erretz and head of research at Paralelo I+D, in Cuenca, and panelist at the Meeting: that discipline beats talent. I think of fermentation and its processes: observing the changes, caring for the conditions, respecting the timing and recording what happens. Every act of research is also an act of discipline.

I think of the Manabí oven and imagine a woman wondering how fire, clay and food behaved. I imagine her because women have sustained and passed on much of that wisdom, observing, testing and teaching other generations.

I already knew the oven, but it was beautiful to understand, thanks to the talk by Valentina Álvarez, of the Iche School, the science and technology it holds, however rustic it may seem. That ancestral knowledge was already science and technology before it was called that. Studying its thermodynamics allows us to better understand that knowledge and explore new possibilities.

How much we still have to research in Ecuador’s four regions: their products, techniques and knowledge! I am excited that initiatives already exist such as Colab Culinaria, a network of gastronomic laboratories in Ecuador that met during the Meeting at the Bahía de Caráquez Museum, which is opening the way and inviting us to keep exploring everything we have yet to know.

I see people who want to keep working to position our cooking and our products, and to tell our culture and history. Eating from our landscape is part of the path: knowing what grows nearby and valuing those who produce it.

The signing of the agreement between Science & Cooking and Fundación FUEGOS, represented by Pere Castells and Orazio Bellettini, excites me because of the learning and research opportunities it can open. I hope more cooks, students and producers can access them.

Every cook and researcher must find their question: the thing that sparks their curiosity. Looking for answers takes time, commitment and perseverance to pose hypotheses, test, make mistakes and learn.

Blessed curiosity. I hope these spaces strengthen a network of collaboration and turn what was learned into concrete ways of improving people’s lives.

I want to begin by thanking those who joined us at the Gastronomic Research Meeting The future of food lies in its origins. I especially thank those who traveled hundreds and even thousands of kilometers to be with us in Manabí.

There is a growing consensus that one of the defining features of our time is a crisis of the future. As the United Nations has warned, the current global crisis is marked by deep geopolitical division, rising war and other forms of violence, climate change, political instability and an inequality that keeps growing. This is not a simple accumulation of problems. It is an intertwining of crises that interact and reinforce one another, and Edgar Morin proposed calling it a polycrisis.

A polycrisis demands holistic solutions that integrate the economic, the social, the environmental and the cultural. Those solutions cannot come only from States or large companies: they have to include all of us.

I hold that the way we feed ourselves every day can be an important part of the solution to the polycrisis we are living through. If a significant part of humanity reduced its consumption of meat and ultra-processed products, and began to consume more fresh and local products, we would significantly reduce climate change, the inequalities between the rural and urban worlds and the malnutrition pandemic that affects the world.

For a seemingly simple, everyday act to become a powerful tool to change the present and the future, we need more and better research. Building on five years of work by the Iche School of Food and Hospitality, we are establishing the Iche Higher Technological Institute. I want to share the principles that will guide the research we want to carry out, trusting that they will be useful for the dialogue this Meeting opened.

Researching in a glocal key

There is one word that sums up how we want to do research: glocal. It means thinking with our feet in the territory and our eyes on the world.

Our questions are born here, in Manabí: in its sea, in its land and in its people. But we build the answers in dialogue with the world, with the best tools of science, with colleagues from other countries and with other cuisines asking the same questions.

We do not want to copy models from abroad or shut ourselves in with what is ours. We want a technique for preserving meat or grains from a community in this territory to be able to converse with a scientific research laboratory at Harvard or the University of Barcelona, and for both to learn something.

Alliances are the fundamental part of the glocal: they are the bridge for Manabí’s knowledge to circulate, be valued and return to those who created it. That is why, at the close of the day, we signed two agreements. The first, with the Science & Cooking World Congress, through Pere Castells, to bring science and cooking together between Europe and Latin America. The second, with Galapagos Foundation, through Luciana Bianchi, with whom we share the conviction that gastronomy can also conserve, and which connects Galápagos with the Manabí coast.

They are joined by organizations from our own country that have been doing this for years without calling it research.

Transformative research

The second characteristic of our research is that it is transformative. We achieve this with a methodology that unites three dimensions that are often kept apart:

• Research, which begins in the classroom from the first term, because we want students who ask, record and compare, not just repeat.
• Outreach, which is not about bringing knowledge to the community but about building it with them. The market cooks, the producers and the comunas are not our object of study: they are our teachers and partners.
• Engagement, which connects academia with those who produce and those who make decisions, so that what we learn becomes real value for the territory.

We do all this as a learning community: teachers, students, cooks and community learning together, in the kitchen, in the laboratory and in the field.

Open and collaborative research

The third characteristic is our conviction in open and collaborative research, which abandons the pretension that knowledge is generated only in closed, specialized spaces.

At the Iche Institute we believe in open research, in which knowledge is born from a dialogue of knowledges. In that dialogue, the tacit, unwritten knowledge carried by the women who hold traditional knowledge meets that of scientists from the best universities. We are sure that together they will achieve what they could hardly reach separately.

Returning to the origins

This Meeting is called The future of food lies in its origins, and we truly believe it. Researching how to give gastronomic value to our biodiversity is a way of not losing ourselves: of reconnecting with our essence, with what makes us unique, so that we can decide, with knowledge, what we want to be.

I cannot conclude without thanking the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, CAF, and the technical cooperation of Hivos for their support in making these days a reality. Thank you for being here and for joining this network. Welcome to a space where we reflect and commit to actions that help us build a better future for gastronomy and for the world.

Welcome to Iche, to San Vicente, to Manabí.

In any Spanish cooking school that issues officially recognized qualifications, students will begin their training exploring the shades of a roux, making veloutés and dark stocks, learning the secrets of a hollandaise sauce and how it differs from a béarnaise. The curriculum is based on Escoffier. I was able to see this for myself in my (unsuccessful) attempt to finish a degree in Kitchen Management not so long ago. Of course, I had already spent years in a profession, food journalism, that requires sitting down almost daily at the tables of all kinds of restaurants, and I was powerfully struck by the gap between what I was learning at school and what I was eating out in the street. That in an Andalusian public school we used —at least in the first year; I gave up before the second— far more butter than olive oil; that we turned potatoes, carrots and mushrooms; and that, while menus were filling up with ajoblancos, gazpachuelos and adobillos —classic or fusion—, Andalusian dishes appeared only occasionally in our classes.

Those who designed the curricula will say that some standard was needed, and look, it never hurts to know how to glaze vegetables and make cream sauces. They are delicious. The problem is that most students are not going to devote themselves to French cuisine. Some will end up in the kind of hotels for which the restaurant is a mere formality; others will seek the security of public-sector exams that they will sit without any more contact with the market than their internships; and the rest, equipped with some basics and a working method, will learn what they need to learn by working here and there. Of course there are also restless teachers who fight to introduce teachings that connect students with their land, or that meet current demands of the sector (bread-making, fermentation…), but they have to do it as an add-on, because the system tests on Escoffier.

Sometimes it is an advantage to start from scratch with the determination to create a model of your own that fits into the culinary culture of a place. That is the case of Iche, the school built in Ecuador by the Fuegos foundation in Manabí, where the most restless and interesting young professionals in Ecuador are being trained. The gastronomic ferment led by Iche has made Manabí this year’s World Region of Gastronomy. While earlier generations of cooks sought that something extra through internships or university training in Europe, the new one is developing a varied and unique offering, often returning to the rural surroundings where they grew up and drawing on the trades of their elders —farmers, fishermen— to offer gastronomic experiences truly worthy of the name.

Iche is at once a very modern and a very ancestral school. Its maxim and purpose is to educate in a culture of innovation, but its heart is not an industrial kitchen —though it has one too— but the traditional Manabí oven and the garden of leaves, aromatic herbs and chili peppers that, together with a base of peanut and plantain, make up the foundation of an astonishingly rich cuisine, varied in products and recipes. An oven that local students have seen at work in homes or in their villages, and that reproduces a system as primitive as cooking in pits dug in the ground, but in this case set on a table.

The Manabí oven is an island; it can be approached from any of its four sides. Those who grew up with it say it is also the center of domestic life, because there is always something to do at it. It is lit with firewood early in the morning, food is cooked over an open fire in clay pots set over the openings, ingredients are brought in from the garden —also common in homes, even if only in planters— according to the aromas each preparation calls for, and when the stews over the live fire are done, the hole is filled with breads and various doughs or with fillings wrapped in banana leaves, which are covered and left to cook all night with the residual heat. The Manabí oven needs daily maintenance. When the cooking is over, the ash produced by the combustion is carefully spread over the entire surface and pressed down by hand. It serves both to set the base and to disinfect.

The students take part in this ritual every day, led by Valentina Álvarez, an astonishing heritage cook, with no training beyond what she learned from her mother and in a few internships, and yet able to interpret that whole legacy, making the school’s restaurant one of the unmissable tables in a country with delicious food. On the dining-room side, the students recover traditional knowledge of fermentation and distillation for use in cocktails. A drinks list that could compete in the big leagues of the profession.

Iche’s great achievement, as a school, restaurant, laboratory and incubator of gastronomic projects, is to have brought the knowledge and flavors that define Manabí’s identity into the training of professionals. Talking with Valentina Álvarez about what the revolution in Ecuadorian cooking needed to reach a good end, instead of answering something like “promotion and tourism”, she said: “we need training and windows of opportunity for producers too, because the day we no longer have our products, our cuisine will be a fake”.

The inevitable question is whether schools conceived in that spirit could help revitalize rural areas in a Spain that has been immersed in rural exodus since the 1960s. Because throughout the country’s diverse and varied geography there are districts tied to products: wine or olive oil, Iberian pork, goat and sheep; shellfish gathering and game; cereals or market gardens. Districts that could find an alternative to abandonment in the alliance between production and gastronomy. Districts whose hospitality schools keep running on mandatory curricula that look very far away from there, and that only depart from Escoffier’s book if they are lucky enough to have a management or teaching staff more enthusiastic than their paycheck demands of them.

For a week I accompanied seven young cooks who came from Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, Costa Rica, the United States, the Bahamas and Martinique for the first edition of the Americas Young Chef Award. The competition is organized by IGCAT, which has already held ten editions in Europe, and this time it crossed the ocean: Fundación FUEGOS hosted it in Ecuador, at Iche, in San Vicente, Manabí.

My job was to look after them. To make sure they arrived well, ate, rested, and had what they needed to cook calmly. I am a chef and I studied social management, and rarely have those two parts of me come together as much as in those days: being in the kitchen and, at the same time, paying attention to people.

The first thing that surprised me was their drive. A drive to go far, to make things happen, and a passion that showed in everything. But it was not loose energy: they came prepared, committed and with great respect for what they had learned from their mentors, their universities and their countries.

For a long time I had held on to a hope: that there would be a generation of cooks eager to look inward, to understand where they come from and to build from there. Meeting them turned it into certainty. They came to compete with technique and science, but also with their tradition and their territory.

Each dish told something about who cooked it and the place they came from. The flavors, the tableware and the drink were part of the same story. And behind it you could see the work of the mentors, who had taken the time to listen, to accompany and to help shape the ideas without taking away from each cook what they wanted to say.

Over the two days of competition I saw those ideas become dishes. Each one presented a traditional proposal and an innovation proposal, linked by their products and by the story they wanted to tell. They had to work in a kitchen they did not know, with nerves and with setbacks, and still they pulled off every preparation. The clock was ticking and they moved between the hope of winning and the pressure of cooking live. And in the middle of all that, they enjoyed it.

What moved me most happened outside the competition, while we traveled around Manabí. They helped each other, talked, taught each other things. They were getting to know a new place, trying different foods and, some of them, wrestling with a language that was not their own. Among them formed the kind of bonds that only come from living something like this together. When it was announced that Giacomo Centurión, from Peru, was the winner, I saw everyone truly happy for him. That is one of the loveliest things I brought back.

The jury was another gift. There were cooks, researchers and journalists, each looking from their own discipline, with the experience, knowledge and judgment to assess what reached the table. Watching them evaluate, hearing them talk and sharing time with them was a school for those of us accompanying the young cooks as well.

It made me very happy to hear what they want to do. They want to travel, learn and work in great kitchens, and they also want to research their products and create proposals from their roots, in their own countries. I am excited to think how far what they learn, and what they share with their peers and with those who come after them, can go. That is why I value these spaces so much, and the people who work to make them exist.

That is what I take away from having been their attaché: the joy of meeting them and of watching them cook the way I am most passionate about understanding cooking, as science, as culture and as pleasure.

I leave with more certainties than questions, and with a great desire to see how far these young cooks will go.