Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
21
Rincon del Pollo de Adeje, Los Cris
I like it when I go to a restaurant and the food is a nice surprise. But I also like it when I go somewhere and it’s exactly as it was last time. And that’s El Rincon – the spicy Adeje chicken without going to Adeje for it. It is, of course, pretty much all they do – the other menu items are starters or something to have with the chicken. Our order never varies except sometimes we have bread, sometimes we don’t. This time we did. It comes with garlic butter. The salad is just iceberg lettuce, tomato and onion, in a very sharp dressing. We eat that as a starter. There’s chips, of course. And the chicken – six pieces for the two of us. Three thighs, three drumsticks. Very crisp skin and still moist meat. It’s fiery from a coating of garlic, chilli, smoked paprika and the oil it was fried in. It’s a lovely lunch worth seeking out. And you will have to seek it out- you’re unlikely to casually stumble across the restaurant.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
22
Pa’lante, Los Cris
This was our third visit since the restaurant opened a couple of years ago. It seems to be firmly established now. Just about every table was occupied , including their expansion onto a small terrace at the front, so I’d reckon booking is all but essential. It’s a short menu in comparison with many of the tourist restaurants. Short but ecletic. And all the better for it.
The chef/owner is Belgian and nothing says “Belgian starter” better than cheese croquettes. Rich and very cheesy, with a crisp coating. You get four. You also get four of the other starter – mini onion tarte tatin. Crisp pastry with long cooked sweetish onion, balanced with a topping of goats cheese.
For mains, there’s a ribeye steak. It comes accurately cooked as requested with mixed veg, an onion ring and a choice of sauce (green perppercorn in this case). The other plate was intended as a light option. Tuna steak, just seared on the outside and raw in the middle. It sat on a chopped salad. The intention of “light” fell apart with a side order of chips – who can resist a Belgian chef’s chips?
Only one of us wanted dessert – a perfectly executed crème brulee. Espresso to finish was first rate.
5 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
23
Meson Castellano, PDLA
We go back years with the restaurant. Back to the time when it didn’t have a menu and you discussed with the waiter, mainly in Spanish, what they had available that day and what you might want to eat. It’s one of only a handful of places that are a “must visit” for us on every trip. There’s nothing fancy about the food and it’s classic Spanish - take good ingredients and don’t be overly cheffy with them.
A mixed salad generously fed both of us as a starter and an accompaniment to the main courses. Top quality ingredients including tomatoes which actually tasted of tomato. It puts the high price of €12 sort of into context. Although not entirely. The other starter was revoeltos – scrambled egg with prawns, mushrooms and green beans. Delish and enhanced with really tasty bread with a great crust.
For a main course, grilled hake was simplicity itself and perfectly cooked. Nothing else on the plate, except a wedge of lemon, although Canarian potatoes were served seoarately. Veal chop was a T-bone steak by any other name. Easily 3cm thick and accurately cooked as requested – that was “medium” which experience tells us is the Spanish equivalent of a Britsh “medium rare”. There’s a little garnish of fried tomato and a few Padron peppers. As you might expect, there were dishes of both green and reed mojo sauce – the quite firery red worked really well with both the fish and veal.
We passed on dessert, having in mind stopping at one of the ice cream stalls that we pass on the walk back to the apartment. Really good dinner – possibly the best of the trip.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
24
Naipi, PDLA
A newish opening at the ocean end of The Patch buildings, in the old Burger King premises. Money has been spent on the conversion and it looks modern and stylish. Such a contrast to the generally tired and down market feel of the rest of the immediate area. Hopefully, it may be the spark for a regeneration of the Patch, although I wouldn’t bet on it.
The menu is very eclectic. It runs from sushi to pizza, stopping off for the likes of Peruvian dishes and burgers. Whether such a diverse offering will work long term is another matter – I hope it does. To start, their take on a Cesar salad simply wasn’t a Cesar salad. But it was a nice enough mixed leaf salad with prawns, cashews, Parmesan and mustard dressing. There was also a very fusiony, and successful, bao bun. Long cooked pork belly with sweet potato, pickled onion and mayo spiked with Peuvian Aji chilli.
Main courses were a bit problematical. The staff don’t write down your orders, presumably relying on memory in however they communicate with the kitchen. In this case, it didn’t work and the request for a burger to be “well done” resulted it in it coming very rare. It had to be sent back. Now, we hate having to do this as it spoils the enjoyment of having dinner together. You watch your partner eat then they watch you eat. So we usually put up with issues like this if at all possible. But this was getting on for being raw and just impossible to eat. When it came back, it was fine. Decent flavour, good toppings of tasty cheese and bacon on a brioche bun, served with a portion of fries. While that was being recooked , I was demolishing a plate of lomo saltado. I’ve had this before in Peruvian restaurants and know it’s a dish based on the food of Chinese immigrants to Peru. Think of it as a beef stir-fry with peppers, cherry tomatoes, chill pepper and a Chifa sauce (another Chinese/Peruvian fusion, using mainly Chinse ingredients like soy sauce) . It comes with rice and was a lovely, and very different, plate of food.
5 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
25
Friends, PDLA
There’s much to like about Friends. It’s got a great beachside location, a good menu which goes beyond the usual tourist staples and staff who are on the ball. We used to go on most trips but just got a bit bored with it. After a few years gap, we decided it was time to give it another go. We went for lunch.
There are 15 or so tapas dishes on the lunch menu and the deal is that you pick four for a fized price of €19.95. They come with chunks of baguette and alioli. My companion in life picked Padron peppers, fish croquettes (a bit gloopy in texture), patatas bravas (nice) and cubes of lightly spiced grilled beef (very nice). It makes for quite a balanced , yet substantial, meal. I picked a dish I remembered from previous visits – a pork fillet skewer. Large chunks of meat, perfectly grilled so there was a bit of char on the outside but the inside was still juicy and succulent. There’s a delish peanut satay suace – earthy from the peanuts, a bit of sweetness and a nice background hit of chilli. Perfect for dunking the meat. Or, indeed, the fries that accompanied it. There’s also a handful of mixed salad to lighten things up Good coffee to finish.
5 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
26
Ciao Toto, PDLA
It’s no longer just a pizzeria, serving excellent pizza,. It’s now pretty much a bog standard Italian restaurant , serving a range of dishes, including just OK pizza. I used to reckon they were some of the best pizza I’d ever eaten. But no longer. And the service wasn’t that great either.
FWIW, we had a pizza Napoli and one with sausage and friarielli. As mentioned, both were OK but only OK, and it was nice to have the bitterness of the friarielli – it’s rare to see that in the UK. I think the restaurant will come off our “must visit” list for the next trip, as it’s a fair walk from where we stay and it’s probably no longer worth the schlep.
4 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
27
Garibaldi, PDLA
I wondered if Garibaldo had changed hands since we were last here in December 2023. It’s always been quite a stylish place and, over the years, has become a firm favourite for us to have dinner on the last night of the holiday. A quality send-off, if you will, as we go back to the cold and damp of Northern Europe. In spite of its Italian name, , it’s never really been an Italian restaurant and the menu has always felt more “classic Spanish” than anything else. That’s changed (hence my wondering about a change of ownership). It’s now distinctly an Italian menu. And a high-end one at that. High end ingredients run through the menu. And there’s high end prices to match.
We both went with the same starter – an artichoke fully cooked through, with black olive tapenade dotted amongst the leaves. A creamy sauce, incorporating crisp little chunks of guanciale, sets it off. Good dish!
Not everything on the menu is Italian and suckling pig is one of those exceptions and it’s something I can rarely ignore. The manager explained they buy the pig in each week from Segovia (the best known city for suckling pig), breaking it down and compressing it before cooking it “sous vide” for a very long time. It’s delish – one of the bestt bits of suckling pig I’ve ever eaten. There’s a little mashed potato on the plate and a scattering of broad beans and mushrooms but these are more garnish than accompaniment. There’s a pleasant enough sauce that may have been the “essence of apple” mentioned on the menu, but I couldn’t get any apple there or anywhere else. On the other plate, there was two fillets of Atlantic sea bass. Flavour and cooking was exemplary with crisp skin. The same potato and veg garnish as the other dish and we shared a side order of fries.
Tiramisu for both of us. A good example with a hit from coffee if not from booze. A very grown-up dessert. Espresso was excellent.
So this was all good. However – and it’s quite a big however – we did have an issue with the “entertainment”. There used to be a really nice pianist crooning away in the background, not intruding on your enjoyment of dinner. The night we were there, there was a saxophonist. Now it wasn’t his actual music that was the issue, just how he delivered it. It was his regular attempts to get diners to sing along with him. It was him wandering about the restaurant almost waving the sax at you. And, at one point, he went outside and dragged in an elderly couple, getting them to have a bit of a dance in the middle of the restaurant, before shooing them out again. Now, there are restaurants in the area where all that might be entirely appropriate. But it’s certainly not what you expect of a place clearly aspiring to be a fine dining restaurant. It’s just completely the wrong atmosphere. Garibaldi needs to make its mind up what it want to be - either fine dining or tourist entertainment. It cannot successfully do both.
Sounds like you ate your share of good food, John! I’ve only ever been to Gran Canaria, but my late uncle & cousins used to go to Tenerife all the time.
2 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
29
I did. Herself says she’s added three pounds. I don’t dare get on the scales.
re mangos and curry in the middle east - these are ingredients used in iraq the other gulf states and probably elsewhere - mangos are apparently grown in the regionSaudi, Egypt, even Israel for example ( and they are used in amba - a sauce with fenugreek served in iraq, kuwait, yemen - in israel too, brought in by the sephardic population. Its interesting that Habibi serves an iraqi stew with limes - probably the black dried limes fro the gulf area. Maybe its one of those cases where you have folks (iraqi kurds) serving more crowd pleasing middle eastern food and slipping in some of their own country’s food too? Its interesting.
Hope to get to the canaries some day! thanks for the report!
Wow - thanks for the wonderful report! Such a pleasure to read your write ups.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
36
My sister in law had dinner in Garibaldi tonight and said there was a great pianist. So, maybe the sax player only plays when the pianist is on a day off. Although I’d love to think that the comments we gave to the manager last week may have been taken on board.
