Cotoa is the best Ecuadorian restaurant in Miami. This is both true and a severe understatement, considering you can count all of Miami’s Ecuadorian restaurants on one hand. It’s more accurate to say that Cotoa is one of the best restaurants in Miami, because it gives ordinary pantry staples the flowers they deserve. Over and over again, Cotoa reinvents traditional Ecuadorian dishes the chef grew up eating. Whether or not you, too, grew up with Ecuadorian food, dinner here will feel simultaneously comforting and electric, like being swaddled in your childhood quilt on the peak of Mount Everest. So many of the ingredients on display—plantains, rice, cassava—are staples in the vast majority of Miami pantries. Seco de pollo (a chicken stew with fried plantains) turns into tortellini. It’s seven summersaults and three connecting flights away from the original dish, but the tomato sauce, plantain-injected pasta, and bits of chicken keep the essence of the original vision alive. Same goes for the mahi mahi manicero that has the peanut flavor of jipijapa ceviche, but takes a tropical detour with coconut and ginger added to the mix. The creative twists don’t just end with the familiar. Cotoa takes this same ingenious approach with unexpected ingredients. This kitchen has about as many uses for cacao as there are commands in a Bop It. The extract is used to make a honey drizzle for cassava croquettes and an infusion for a lime iced tea infinitely superior to an Arnold Palmer. It’s converted into ice cream, and then its nibs are sprinkled atop the very same scoop. You know those sticks of palo santo your yoga teacher uses to try and reorient the minds of Miami scammers? Here, it’s whipped into butter, made into yet another remarkable ice cream, and its ashes are used as a garnish. In their hands, certain ingredients feel limitless. Your brain may start shooting emergency signals to your wallet when you see watermelon radishes chopped into symmetrical matchsticks, and perfectly congruent beads of oil. But you won’t have to worry about that. It’s a reading nook of a restaurant, with rainbow banana lamps, warm terracotta walls, and a basket of socks for sale by the front door (emblazoned with bananas, of course). It’s all as accessible as the kitchen counter where you first met these ingredients.