Locro de papa in Quito: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

Locro de papa is a potato soup, and saying only that undersells it. A proper bowl is thick enough to hold a spoon upright for a moment, pale gold rather than white, and thickened by the potatoes themselves: part of them is cooked until it collapses into the broth, part is left in soft pieces. Milk goes in near the end, then crumbled fresh cheese, which softens into the soup without quite melting. It arrives with slices of avocado laid on top or alongside, and the avocado is not a garnish but half the point: cool and fatty against something hot and starchy.

The gold color comes from achiote, annatto, fried with onion and garlic at the start in a base called a refrito. That is the dish’s signature as much as the potatoes are, and it is why a locro that arrives white has skipped a step.

It belongs to Quito because it belongs to the highlands the city sits in. The potato is an Andean crop, the word locro comes from Quechua, and the milk and cheese arrived with the Spanish: the soup is that history in one bowl, and in a city where evenings are cold all year it is the obvious thing to eat. In Quito it is often simply called locro de queso, and cooks treat it as the base from which the other locros are made. No designation protects it and no famous origin story is attached to it; when the Ministry of Tourism mapped the country’s food by province in 2018, this was the dish it chose for the province around the capital, which is as close to an official claim as a soup gets.

The other thing worth knowing is that the right potato matters more than any recipe detail. Highland cooks use a floury, yellow-fleshed potato that breaks down readily, papa chola above all, sometimes alongside a firmer one that keeps its shape. The texture is the test: thick, slightly rough, with pieces you can still find.

What to order

On a menu it may be locro de papa, plain locro, or locro de queso where the kitchen wants to stress the cheese. In Quito they are the same soup. Order it and expect one deep bowl, avocado, cheese stirred through, and usually a small dish of ají, a loose chili sauce, on the table or brought with it.

How to eat it, which is where a visitor shows: add the ají a spoonful at a time, because table ají here varies from bright and mild to properly hot, and nobody tastes it first on your behalf.

The relatives worth recognizing on the same board:

• yahuarlocro — from the Kichwa for “blood”: the same potato base with lamb offal, served with the animal’s blood, cooked and crumbled, and with onion and avocado. A different meal, richer and stronger-tasting, and not what you get if you ask for locro.
• locro de cuero — the potato soup with pieces of pork skin cooked into it. Heavier, and more often a home or market dish than a restaurant one.
• other locros — the word stretches to thick vegetable soups built the same way, with squash or other vegetables in place of the potato. The bare word on its own almost always means the potato one.

If you are offered a choice between a cup and a bowl, the cup is a starter and the bowl is a light meal on its own. With the avocado and cheese it is more filling than it looks.

What to avoid

The commonest disappointment sold under this name is a generic potato soup: thin broth, cubes of potato, a little cream, no gold from achiote and no fresh cheese. It is not bad food. It is just not the dish, and the giveaway is visible before you taste it — you can see the bottom of the bowl through the liquid.

At the other extreme, a locro blended perfectly smooth and finished with cream is a kitchen translating the soup into something more familiar. The real one is rough-textured on purpose. If there are no pieces of potato left at all, it has been put through a blender for someone else’s expectations.

A locro without avocado, or with a single thin slice, is a kitchen economizing on the most expensive ingredient. Grated hard yellow cheese in place of soft white fresh cheese is the same economy, and it changes the soup: it strings and goes oily instead of softening.

Late in the day, a pot that has been kept warm since lunch thickens into something closer to mashed potato, with the cheese gone rubbery. Where locro is part of the set lunch, it was made for lunch, and a bowl ordered in the evening from the same pot is the reheated version.

One confusion to be aware of if you have eaten locro elsewhere: in Argentina and around it the word means a slow stew of corn, beans and meat, a winter festival dish. Argentine restaurants abroad use the name for that. It shares a Quechua root with this soup and almost nothing else.

Practicalities

The easiest way to eat locro is as the soup course of a set lunch, the almuerzo: soup, a main plate, a juice and sometimes a small dessert, in an ordinary lunch place filled with office workers between about half past twelve and two. The soup rotates through the week, so locro is on some days and not others; the board by the door, written out that morning, says which. A full set lunch of that kind runs roughly $3 to $6. Ordered on its own in a sit-down restaurant, a bowl is roughly $4 to $9, with the upper end in the more polished rooms of the historic center. If a menu charges well above that, check that the price is not for a version with added extras, since some kitchens sell an upgraded locro with more cheese or toppings.

Lunch is when it is freshest, and the busiest set-lunch places can run out of soup by early afternoon. Arriving around half past twelve beats arriving at two.

Markets with cooked-food stalls serve it too, usually cheaper, in a counter setting with shared tables, and usually earlier in the day than restaurants.

Small lunch places and market stalls work mostly in cash, and in small notes: change for a large bill is not always on hand. Restaurants aimed at visitors take cards readily.

And give it a minute. It arrives very hot, the cheese needs a moment to soften, and the first spoonful taken straight from the surface tells you little about the bowl.