humitas
Ayawaskha has been cooking since Miguel Ángel Méndez set up a modest restaurant (which has been expanding over the years due to its success), in the Mostenses Market.
His son, with whom he shares a name, has spent his whole life watching how his "sensei", as he usually calls her, made a living recovering the flavors and traditions of her Ecuador native from the eyes of a Spaniard. While he was building his own historical memory that has led him to create Ayawaskha , a cultural, artistic and gastronomic project that seeks to recover the Ecuadorian culture and delve into it.
A food market is now regarded as the site for undertake , explore new cultures and let yourself be seen cane in hand among fruit and vegetable stalls, discovering new and interesting projects from the hands of young and adventurous chefs. But ten years ago, when Miguel Ángel Sr. opened MAMFUSION , the situation was not even remotely similar and his clients were, for the most part, compatriots who sought here the flavors of there.
Miguel Angel Mendez, father and son
"Am son of an immigrant , raised in Madrid. That has led me to become interested and force myself to understand my culture . The Latin American who arrives in Spain tries to disassociate himself from all his traditions in order to fit in, but I am doing the opposite. I need to feed on my culture and make it manifest," says Méndez.
"All the movement that composes Ayawaskha born during quarantine at a time when we had a lot of time to think, starting from the base of what we do in the Mercado de los Mostenses, a place where my father has been for the last ten years”, explains Méndez, a 24 year old that communicates the Ecuadorian culture in all kinds of multicultural initiatives and festivals –last year, for example, it allied itself with the 2020 Madrid Carnival– aimed at a young and alternative public.
“There are more than 150 Ecuadorian restaurants in Madrid , we are a very important business fabric and it is time for us to go for it all”, adds Méndez excitedly. But none has managed to conceptualize the gastronomic experience beyond what Ayawaskha proposes (aya in Quechua means soul ywaskha, bond: an ancient concoction and the medicine of the soul), acting through vaijlla, cocktails and a kitchen that maintains a direct contact with communities, ranchers and farmers. all with a common thread – music, fashion, culture and art – and a unique structure: that of a collective.
The first step in doing so has been with a restaurant in Duque de Sesto street , which has currently started with delivery service but that promises to open to the public as soon as the situation allows. “Ayawaskha is a project with which we go to heaven or hell. We take advantage of the situation after confinement to create a risky business, yes, but something very necessary. That is why we also decided to open in a neighborhood like Salamanca . It is not the same to open an Ecuadorian restaurant in Vallecas or in Malasaña, we opened here because we want to position our culture within a world that is not used to considering us high kitchen”.
Backed by referents of the gastronomy of Chinchansuyu –the name of Ecuador before the colony and the one that Ayawaskha seeks to recover–, Méndez relies on chefs like Mauricio Acuña, owner of the El Salnés spicy restaurant , in Quito; Mauricio Recalde, from TheFoodStudiooEC and the baker Diego Suárez Tufino, initiator of the Paneando movement . "We want to promote the gastronomy of Ecuador and change the outlook and the economy of the country . We believe that for Ecuador to be a world power we do not have to sell oil when we have potatoes and avocados," continues Méndez.
Your letter , written in the native language (Kiwcha), poses to the manabi gastronomy as main axis. Costa, Sierra, and Oriente and even Amazonia are present with their identity flavors, in dishes such as corviches , a male green plantain dough with achiote stuffed with tuna; the bolons , with pork rinds, costeño cheese and pickles; the humitas , a typical elaboration of corn dough from the mountains or even a brioche sandwich , stuffed with marinated Iberian pork based on chicha de jora, a fermented malted corn drink from pre-Inca times.
corviches
The crockery, as soon as the restaurant is fully operational, will be Kitsubi Ceramic , with a design guided by Jorge Lanbanderia and a primitive production, made only with a potter's wheel and the kurinuki casting technique . Meanwhile, the interior design of the space will be complemented by the intervention of more than 15 artists from different disciplines.
Urban fashion and sewing firms in Spain, as well as the sneaker culture , are influential sources for young people like Méndez, which is why they have relied on the LATIGO brand for their uniforms. Together with the illustrator and graphic designer Juan Miguel Porres, "Juay" They have also dared to customize your own AirForce1 for each member of the room team. And it is that if something abounds in Ayawaskha it is the collaborations , the desire to make visible "colleagues", artists and characters who can only contribute to making the project broader, more diverse and more complete. Like Frankie Pizá, who is in charge of the musical section of the project, or Vanessa Castillejo, who will be in charge of making visible sewing projects that have their pillars in the ancestral culture of Ecuador.
maybe it's hard encompass and understand everything at first glance , but the roots of Ayawaskha reach and penetrate deep, almost as strong as the nostalgia for the Chinchansuyu that beats in the heart of Miguel Ángel Méndez.
Ayawaskha's Ecuadorian cumbia session on @worldwide.fm