COTOA Restaurant

Cotoa takes Ecuadorian pantry basics — plantains, rice, cassava — and refuses to let them sit still. Seco de pollo, the classic chicken stew with fried plantains, turns up reworked into tortellini, built from a childhood recipe but sent somewhere the original never expected to go. That's the engine here: dishes the chef grew up eating, taken apart and rebuilt without losing what made them comforting in the first place.

The comfort matters as much as the invention. This isn't technique for its own sake — the tomato sauce and the plantain still taste like home, even when the form around them doesn't. That's a harder trick than pure novelty, and it's why the reinvention never feels like a gimmick.

Miami doesn't have many Ecuadorian restaurants to compare it against, but that undersells the case. This is food that would stand out in a much bigger field, and the Bib Gourmand recognition from Michelin's 2026 guide backs that up. Cotoa earns its plate by making familiar ingredients feel unfamiliar again, without ever losing the thread back to where they came from.