Ecoventura - Galapagos

Discipline in a moving galley

Waste reduction begins with a decision before the pan heats. Cristian Puente, Chef at Ecoventura - Galapagos in San Cristóbal, carries that discipline into a dining program that has to cook with the islands, not around them. His career has stayed close to the archipelago, shaped by work on the water and by kitchens that answer to distance, supply, weather, and care. Puente’s own language is direct: “True waste reduction requires discipline, consistency and often letting go of ego in the kitchen.” On a yacht, that is not a sentiment. It is a method.

The house works within a Relais & Châteaux-affiliated expedition setting, where the kitchen serves a small ship rather than a fixed dining room. Ecoventura’s voyages carry 20 guests, and that scale matters. It keeps the pass close to the people eating from it, and it makes excess harder to hide. Puente’s cooking approach, as it appears across his Galapagos work, favors restraint over flourish, using technique to make a place legible. Pastel Maqueño sits in that register: grounded, specific, and built for clarity rather than ornament.

Menus shaped by distance

The program follows the rhythm of the expedition. Breakfast, lunch, snacks after excursions, and plated dinners have to fit around panga rides, snorkeling, hikes, and the return of wet gear to the deck. The kitchen works with Ecuadorian ingredients, seafood, meats, vegetarian dishes, and local or regional sourcing where the islands allow it. Sustainability is not an added theme here; it is part of the mise en place, because provisioning in the Galápagos asks for restraint before it asks for invention.

Dinners often run to 4-5 courses, with soups, salads, seafood, barbecue preparations, and Ecuadorian touches moving through the week. The beverage program follows the same island logic: local craft beer, Galápagos coffee, cocktails, mocktails, and wines chosen for the table rather than for display. A kitchen that serves after 3-4 excursions a day has to be ready for appetite, fatigue, salt, sun, and the quiet ceremony of people sitting down after seeing the islands from the water.

The room is the yacht

The room shifts with the anchorage. Some meals happen inside, in a chic, modern space kept at conversational volume; others move out to the decks, where the service meets open air and the horizon stays in the corner of the eye. The counter is narrow, the pass is moving, and the usual separation between kitchen and landscape falls away. A plate can arrive after snorkeling, after a hike, or after the slow return from a panga ride, and the meal has to hold its shape without competing with the place around it.

That is the discipline Puente’s work points toward: not making the Galápagos theatrical, and not treating remoteness as an excuse. The craft is in control, portioning, sourcing, and the small refusals that keep waste out of the station. Pastel Maqueño is the dish in Cristian Puente’s Galápagos kitchen language.