We liked it here. A lot. It’s the sort of quite stylish place that, if it was at home, would become a place we went to regularly for celebration meals – birthdays and the like. The sort of place that cooks very up-to-date food but one that your unadventurous granny will find something to enjoy.
It’s modernist in design with a glass sided wine storage “room” that acts as a feature in the middle of the restaurant but, also, cleverly, breaks up what would otherwise be a fairly sparse open space.
There’s a shortish menu which tracks across Europe for inspiration supplemented by a handful of specials. One of the latter was a chicken liver salad. – leaves, matchsticks of bacon and lightly cooked livers in a warm , creamy dressing which I think may have had a touch of mustard in there. It worked very well. The other starter was perfectly cooked scallops – charred on the outside, ever so slightly undercooked in the middle, just as you hope they would be. They sat on a salad of seaweed and caramelised endive, dressed in a savoury sauce.
For one main course, there was “fish of the day”, in this case, cherne (often translated in Tenerife as “wreckfish” but sometimes as “grouper”). It was served with lightly cooked vegetables – courgette batons, carrots and asparagus – and a little potato puree. Pig cheeks on the other plate – long cooked till they fell apart at the touch of a fork. They sat on risotto which had been cooked in a really well flavoured meat stock and served quite wet (I prefer that to the very dry risotto you get in pseudo-Italian places in the UK and US). It seems a very simple dish but this takes real skill to pull it off.
Desserts were almost classic offerings and none the worse for that. Crème brulee was a well made and flavoursome custard which came with arty blobs of apple puree (which contained tiny dice of raw apple) and apple foam. Chocolate ganache, on the other plate, worked really well with similar blobs of mango puree – rich and sweet, but not too sweet.
It’s not often that we eat three faultless courses, even at this level of restaurant and it’s a real pleasure when we do. Certainly a place I imagine we’ll return to on future visits to the island.
