Location: Av. de los Shyris y Río Coca (Main) / San Luis Shopping (Valle de los Chillos) / Plaza Antara (Cumbayá), Quito, Ecuador
Kind of Food: Good Ol´ Fashioned American Diner Fare (Latin-American Style!). Fast Food.
Price Range: $3-$10
What I Ordered: Rusty Mix (Rusty Simple with Cheese, Curly Fries, Root Beer)
Comments: Rusty´s is quite an institution in Quito. The place has been around since the time my dad was a teenager in the 1970s and has been run by the same eponymous owner since its inauguration. Rusty (an old aging American wearing his red beret and with his signature blonde mustache styled into Dali-like fashion) will take your order personally if you show up for lunch hour at their main site and he´ll mumble it into a microphone whose sound is lost amongst the sounds of the friers and the burgers and the soda machine. Kinda makes you wonder how your order appears just as you ordered it on the tray at the end of the line. But this is all part of the charm. The other part of the charm is finding a better fast food alternative to McDonald´s and Burger King in Quito that has its own local flair without sacrificing the ability to get some good old-fashioned American diner food if you need it. All for under $6. In all honesty, Rusty´s cheeseburger is one of the best burgers I´ve ever had and it tastes the same way it did when I was a child, and my dad swears it tastes the same way he remembers it tasting back in the 70s. Nevermind the radioactive orange color of the cheese. Biting into that cheeseburger feels oddly comforting and satisfying - a decent fast-food lunch. Served with your delicious burger is a side of fried something of your choice. You can get regular fries, steak fries, onion rings, a pronto orito (basically a corn dog where instead of the hot dog you get a deep-fried plantain - it tastes better than it sounds, trust me), or some cheese poppers. They recently added the option for curly fries too. I haven´t eaten curly fries since I last ventured into the Acropolis Diner 2 blocks away from Vassar College (and I was plenty drunk then and trying to convince my equally drunk friends that I was totes fine despite the recent break-up I´d gone through). I ate a whole plate of them then. But a plate of curly fries from the Acrop certainly don´t measure up to the satisfaction of downing a small order of curly fries from Rusty´s. They came right out of the frier....perfectly spiced and coiled. And then, of course, is the icing on the cake. It is the only place in Quito where you can get Root Beer (Barg´s) from a soda machine.
ROOT BEER.
Do you understand that? I live in a world where you cannot get Root Beer at any restaurant you pop in to. A place that serves traditional American, cold, machine-mixed Root Beer is heaven. And the Cheeseburger-Curly Fries-Root Beer combo at Rusty´s is perfection. So next time you are in Quito and in need of a Cheeseburger fix. Skip McDonald´s and Burger King. Walk past El Corral (and please don´t even LOOK at Tropi Burger). Go straight to Rusty´s and bite into a satisfying meal that is soaked in tradition and recent Quito history.
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