There is not much room at Bad Chancla. The bright pink walk-up on East Olive Way seats a handful of people elbow to elbow, mostly outside, and the kitchen behind the counter is small enough that chef and co-owner José Garzón can talk to you while he cooks. 

Garzón grew up between Guayaquil and the Galápagos, spent years fronting punk bands on world tours, and eventually landed in Washington before building a series of pop-ups and concepts with business partner Stefanie Hieber. Bad Chancla, which they opened in 2024, is billed as a love letter to millennial immigrants and first-generation Latinx Americans, with a bodega-style menu of sandwiches and rice bowls. The slogan, as Garzón puts it, is “not your abuela’s cooking.”

That is, except for the encocado de camarón, shrimp poached in coconut milk and served over rice.

“This is a dish that represents both my African and Latino heritage,” says Garzón. “The dish is from the Esmeraldas region in Ecuador. A region with a strong Afro-Ecuadorian culture. This is currently the one of the only Ecuadorian dishes on the Bad Chancla menu, so it’s been really special to see Seattle embrace Ecuadorian cuisine through it.”

Esmeraldas sits on Ecuador’s northern coast, and encocado, in its many forms, is one of the region’s defining dishes, built on coconut milk and seafood. Garzón has served it at Bad Chancla with cod in past seasons. This summer, it returned with shrimp. His version is deliberately unfussy. “Our encocado de camarón is a very traditional Ecuadorian version,” he says. “It starts with sofrito, coconut milk, and shrimp fumet, and we finish it with fresh garnishes. We keep it pretty simple and let the shrimp and coconut really shine.”

The prep begins with a sofrito of green bell pepper, garlic, onion, and cilantro, cooked down with a concentrated stock made from the shells of the same shrimp that go into the dish. Nothing is wasted, and the stock carries a rich shellfish flavor that coconut milk alone would flatten. He adds coconut milk to the shrimp fumet and gently poaches the shrimp in the sauce, then finishes the dish with fresh lime juice, ají hot sauce, and whole cilantro leaves and stems. “The stems are important,” Garzón says. “They add a lot of flavor.”

Most of the menu is inspired by what Garzón ate to get by after arriving in the U.S.—a playful mix of Latin flavors, American pantry staples, and rock star on the road sensibilities. But the encocado is what he ate at home. “I eat it at least twice a week,” he says. “There are a few dishes that only come back seasonally, and this is one of them. I definitely don’t get tired of it. I eat it as much as I can while it’s on the menu.”

That a dish this labor-intensive comes out of a kitchen this size is a running point of pride. Garzón designed Bad Chancla as an all-electric kitchen from the start and built the menu around what the space could actually do. “A lot of people think we work out of a commissary kitchen, but we cook everything in-house. Every stew, every sauce, and all of our fresh dishes are made right there,” says Garzón. “We have a weekly agua fresca, weekly specials, and we’re constantly finding ways to make the space work for us.”

Garzón is making room for more Ecuadorian favorites. This summer, he added calentado with a fried egg, one of his favorite breakfasts, to the menu.

“My plan is to keep adding Ecuadorian dishes whenever I can,” he says. “Wish me luck!”

Tiffany Ran is a writer and the chef behind Babalio Taiwanese Pop-Up, a Taiwanese food pop-up, and the food editor of TaiwaneseAmerica.org. Much of her food exploration includes jumping between catering, restaurants, and the pop-up world. Her writing has been featured in Vice Munchies, Lucky Peach, Goldthread, JoySauce, Northwest Asian Weekly, and more.