Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
1
It’s a couple of years since my last review of the place, so worth an update.
We go back years with this restaurant – back to the times before they had a menu and you decided what you were going to eat in discussion with the server over what was available and how they would cook it. Ah, those were the days. And we’ve never had a bad meal here (although, on occasions, we’ve not chosen well).
I worried a bit about whether the standards might have dropped with there no longer being direct competition from the now closed Fresquera. I needn’t have worried. Food continues t be classic traditional Spanish – take good ingredients and cook them without mucking about too much. That’s probably why it continues to be popular with locals a well as ex-pats and tourists. And service continues to be as on the ball as it’s ever been – professional but with humour, although don’t expect every server to have a good command of English. But why would you?
I started with a dish I’ve had here before – beans and ham. They take tiny broad beas (presumably dried or frozen) and cook them till tender and mix with them with shreds of crisply fried ham. Simples. The other starter was prawns in garlic oil. You’ll see this as “gambas pil-pil” in parts of Spain. You get prawns, in hot oil with lots of garlic and a little chilli. The bread that had also been provided was ideal for mopping up the flavoured oil.
Sea bass was served whole and had been simply grilled and served with half a lemon. It need nothing more than the carbs in the form of a few Canarian potatoes. Pork fillet had been roasted to “medium”. Nice and juicy and just to the point where you wouldn’t want it any rarer. The slices sat on fried potatoes, onions and peppers - these often appear as accompaiments here. Again, a very simple dish and all the better for it.
Desserts are not that great here, so we passed in favour of getting pancakes and coffee at Ricco - the ice cream place at CC City Center, across the road from Parque Santiago 2.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
2
Worth noting that Ricco, the ice cream place I mentioned has not survived Covid.
1 Like
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
3
We always look forward to eating here. It’s classic, traditional Spanish cooking – take good ingredients and do very little to them. But, having read some recent negative reviews on Tripadvisor, we went with some trepidation. Would Covid have badly affected it? No. Not at all. This was still the old Meson Castellano – good food, good service. Maybe a slightly shorter menu, but this is still one of the top places in the area. From the sound of customer voices, it seemed to be operating almost as two sittings – North European tourists already packing it out when we arrived at 8pm and Spaniards arriving after 9pm.
We’d ordered a couple of starters. As always here, they are served in the middle of the table for sharing. Revueltos is one of my favourites in Spain – well seasoned scrambled eggs mixed, in this case, with prawns and mushrooms. They went well with a large mixed salad – leaf, cucumber, onion, peppers, avocado, tinned white asparagus. We kept some of it to go with the main courses. There’s also thick slcies of a good bread.
Fillet steak came perfectly cooked, as requested. In this, you need to know that Spanish chefs chefs will generally cook meat for less time than British chefs. So, ask for it to be “medium”, if you actually want ti “medium rare”. It comes with chipos but no veg – hence keeping some of the salad. The other main was a generous portion of pork fillet (filet mignon, as the French have it), accurately cooked as requested – cooked through, but only just. That came with excellent sauté potatoes, still tasting of the olive oil they’d been fried i. And a couple of piquillo peppers – more decoration of the plate than anything else.
We know from past experience that the desserts here don’t match the quality of the savoury dishes, so just finished with café solo. Good coffee.
