Why Madrid is still Spain's ultimate food destination

Only the gentle crackling of green foam, artfully smeared on the edge of my plate, breaks the ecclesiastical silence in the two-Michelin-starred Deessa, cloistered within Madrid’s Mandarin Oriental Ritz hotel. I sit in hushed awe at the procession of dishes arriving at my table: prawns from Vinaròs, served with that green curry foam; Galician mullet with galmesán cheese; roasted red pepper cooked with fragrant rice, a dish from the town of Alicante. Every note of flavour is intense yet elegantly balanced, each bite rarefied yet rooted in the essence of the Spanish earth and ocean.

The menu is a mosaic of the finest ingredients and cooking techniques across Spain — gathered and elevated in the capital situated in the country’s geographic centre. This dynamic — of Madrid being at the centre of things, not just literally but figuratively — tells the story of its cuisine, Deessa’s young head chef Domenico Vildacci tells me as he makes his postprandial rounds. “It’s curious,” he says. “Madrid is 185 miles from the sea, but it has the best fish market in Spain. The seafood comes in every morning and goes to markets in Madrid first, before being sold back to the coast. It’s the same with meat and vegetables — the best stuff comes straight here. This is the marketplace of Spain.”

We have King Philip II to thank for this. Seeking a geographically central seat of power, he moved his court to Madrid in 1561, turning what was then an unremarkable city into the capital of the Spanish Empire. The king and his court needed feeding and only the best would do, so huge highways were built connecting the markets of the capital with the provinces, where the freshest produce was grown.

The markets are still the best place to uncover the city’s culinary soul. Departing Deessa, I walk west for 20 minutes, leaving behind the stately avenues and art museums of the Retiro district and entering La Latina, Madrid’s oldest neighbourhood, a warren of streets built on a medieval Moorish citadel. Footballs fly off stone walls as children swarm in the church squares, and the place names reflect the visceral, spit-and-sawdust feel of the district: Plaza de la Paja (Straw Square), site of the former hay market; and El Rastro, the Sunday flea market named for the blood trail (rastro) that led to the former slaughterhouse.

At the heart of it all is Mercado de la Cebada (Barley Market), which began as an open-air affair in the 1500s and now sits in a two-tiered 19th-century hall, its roof topped with pastel-painted domes. Locals come to sip a glass of fino sherry, munch on a gilda (a Cantabrian anchovy, guindilla pepper and manzanilla olive skewered on a toothpick) and purchase fresh produce.

When King Philip II made Madrid his capital, one of the prized ingredients was an upstart fruit called the tomato, freshly imported from the Americas just a few decades previously. In the centuries since, it’s become a cornerstone of Spanish cuisine, grated on bread for breakfast, reduced into rich sauces and playing a starring role in salads. On the bottom floor of Mercado de la Cebada, I visit the stall of Pedro Díaz, Madrid’s tomato king. Pedro, who grew up around his father’s stall in this market, bustles about showing me some of the varieties he has on sale: small, scarlet cherries, glistening like fish roe; the elongated perita, used in gazpacho; and the squash-like huevo de toro (bull’s egg), vast and gloriously gnarled and mutated.

Pedro points towards an incongruously perfect-looking variety, suspiciously smooth, round and red — and, apparently, not quite so tasty. “Long-life tomatoes,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand, before adding with a smirk, “I send these ones to France.”

Pedro picks up a tiger-striped ambrosia tomato, slices it on a board, seasons it with olive oil and salt, and hands it to me. It lives up to its name. It is indeed a tomato of the gods — incredibly sweet, yet sharp enough to prickle the inside of my cheeks. “For so long, Spanish people have taken tomatoes for granted,” he says. “Recently, though, you go to restaurants in Madrid and people are serving tomato steaks with a little oil and salt. That’s all you need.”

Vermouth hour

The humble tomato isn’t the only classic undergoing a renaissance in Madrid. Although originally invented in Italy, the fortified wine vermouth is the archetypal Spanish aperitif, classically enjoyed after church on a Sunday or before a meal. It was once seen as something rather stuffy and old-fashioned, but it’s staging a serious comeback, with a burgeoning craft vermouth scene emerging from new and established wineries across Madrid. To find out more, I’ve booked a vermouth-tasting at Madrid & Darracott, a vinoteca a short walk from Mercado de la Cebada, opened in 2018 by Roque Madrid and Luke Darracott as part of their mission to educate locals and visitors about Spanish wine.

“Vermouth is part of the cultural fabric of Spain,” says Luke as he assembles an array of bottles on the table. “Every little old bar has their vermut de grifo [vermouth on tap]. But after the end of the Franco era in 1975, young people turned to beer and wine, which were seen as more modern and international.”

In the past 10 years, that’s changed: the artisanal vermouth scene has taken off in Madrid. The drink has a loose definition (fortified wine, sweetened and flavoured with wormwood and other botanicals) and can be simply and cheaply produced from lower-quality base wines. Luke pours out a few glasses for me to try — in addition to the traditional vermouth made from white wine, there are varieties made from red wines and those flavoured with hops and barley, each one subtly different, but retaining the thick, sweet, almost medicinal flavour inherent to the drink. “There are so many new vermouths coming out, it’s impossible to keep up,” says Luke.

While some traditions are revived and reinterpreted, other pillars of Madrid’s cuisine simply carry on, abiding as they always have done. A five-minute walk from Madrid & Darracott is the famous eatery Botín, which opened in 1725; it’s listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world.

Its top-right exterior balcony bears a bent baluster — the legacy of a piece of shrapnel from the Spanish Civil War. Inside, the floors are chequerboard-tiled and the ceilings striped with wooden beams. A half-open stable door offers a glimpse into the kitchen, where the shelves are stacked with roasted suckling pigs, butterflied flat — the restaurant’s signature dish, with close to 100 whole pigs served every day. “The recipe hasn’t changed in 300 years,” says director José González, a grey-bearded man in a tweed jacket and bow tie. José is the third generation of the second family to run Botín in its three centuries of existence.

The smell of ingredients involved in the preparation of the cochinillo (suckling pig) hangs in the air: tarragon, white wine, onion, laurel and thyme. It’s cooked for more than two hours over holly oak wood in an open oven, which occupies a corner of the kitchen. “Each morning, the chef comes in, rakes the warm coals and fires it up again,” says José. “This oven hasn’t gone cold for 300 years.”

Given Botín’s age, it’s no surprise that it’s accumulated associations with prominent cultural figures over the centuries. Legend has it that a young Francisco Goya, prior to becoming Spain’s foremost painter in the 18th century, washed dishes here. José motions to a small table in a back corner of the room where tax exile Ernest Hemingway would eat his cochinillo with his back to the wall, keeping a watchful eye on the door for the IRS agents he was convinced were coming to collect the money he owed.

He’s far from the only famous writer associated with the Spanish capital. Saying goodbye to José and Botín, I make the short walk to the Barrio de las Letras (Literary Quarter), where the flagstones of Calle Huertas are engraved with lines from literature, their golden letters burning softly in the evening sunlight. They include the opening passage of Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes in the spot now occupied by Casa Alberto, a red-fronted tapas bar famed for its vermouth.

A plaque outside a chocolatería claims their churros served as writing fuel for Ramón del Valle-Inclán, whose play Bohemian Lights is a grotesque, tragicomic satire of 1920s Madrid told through the voice of a blind poet. Valle-Inclán called his style esperpento, and was said to have been inspired by the fairground-like mirrors that stood on the Callejón del Gato, reflecting back inverted, distorted impressions of passersby. Two of these mirrors still stand on the same street, outside Las Bravas, a bar that claims to be the birthplace of patatas bravas.

International influences

The following morning, I set out in search of a livener. Madrid’s coffee scene is changing, with a number of speciality cafes providing an alternative to the traditional torrefacto — low-quality robusta beans, roasted with sugar to offset their inherent bitterness — ubiquitous to Spanish cafes. The rise in higher-quality artisanal cafes in the past decade has been driven by an influx of expats from Latin America. One such is Hugo Hernández, whose coffee shop, Cafeteando, sits beside the Plaza de Olavide in the upmarket Trafalgar neighbourhood. “One in seven people in Madrid are from Latin America,” says Hugo as he makes me a flat white, “and they probably run nine out of 10 of the coffee places that have opened in the past few years. The speciality coffee scene has increased probably between 1,000 and 2,000% in the last decade.”

Hugo is from Honduras, and moved to Madrid with his Spanish wife over 10 years ago. Given the historical links between Spain and Latin America, it’s easier for people from some former Spanish colonies to settle in Spain, giving them the chance to attain citizenship within two years rather than the usual 10. The result has been an injection of diverse influences into Madrid’s food and drink culture, among every other realm of life. Colombian, Venezuelan and Ecuadorian restaurants are popping up all over the city, while Peruvian venues occupy a corner of the Mercado de Los Mostenses, making use of Madrid’s seafood market to conjure up ceviches and seafood rice dishes.

The influence of immigrant communities on Madrid’s cuisine is far from a new phenomenon, however. In fact, the city’s most famous dish, cocido madrileño (a chickpea-based stew) has ancient origins with Sephardic Jews (Jewish people living in the Iberian Peninsula), who developed slow-cooked stews to circumvent laws prohibiting cooking on the Sabbath. I finish my coffee and make the half-hour walk to one of Madrid’s most famous cocido restaurants, the 19th-century Lhardy. Director Gregorio Contreras greets me in the elegant, dark-wood dining room and explains that cocido began as a cheap peasant dish. It’s clear, as he brings plate after heaving plate to my table, that things have evolved somewhat since then. First comes a rich noodle soup, then mounds of chickpeas and cabbage, and, finally, pork in various forms, including chorizo from León and morcilla (blood sausage) from Val d’Aran.

Nowadays, cocido is a distinctly non-kosher dish, with the introduction of pork believed to date back to the 15th century and the Christian reconquest of Spain from its Muslim rulers. Fearing they might be exposed as non-Christians by the Spanish Inquisition, Madrileños added pork, which Muslims and Jews couldn’t eat, to many dishes — even those with Jewish origins such as cocido. The history, of course, doesn’t play on the mind of most modern locals. “For us, cocido just reminds us of childhood, of eating and talking with family on a Sunday,” Gregorio says.

Nevertheless, the dish’s complex and many-layered history makes it the perfect symbol of Madrid, this mosaic city in the heart of Spain, bejewelled by the people drawn here, the food they eat and the stories they share.

Top three Vermouth Bars to visit

1. Taberna La Concha
This blue-painted bar is on Calle de Cava Baja, a street known for its tapas. Sweet vermouth was originally invented in Turin in the 1780s and La Concha pays homage to that heritage by serving its vermouth in a martini glass sprayed with gin, plus an olive and a couple of drops of Campari.

2. La Gildería
As the name suggests, this modern vermutería emphasises not only its fantastic vermouths, but also the tapa that traditionally accompanies the drink: the gilda. Skewered anchovies, olives, cornichons and pickled peppers are the classic combination, and this place serves it with a wide range of vermouths, including their own homemade creation.

3. Bodega de la Ardosa
Perhaps the city’s most famous vermouth bar opened in 1892 and it looks the part: dark wood walls, azulejo tiles, hams hanging from the ceiling, and, if you’re lucky, a barrel to lean on. The vermouths tend towards the classic; opt for the homebrew de grifo (on tap), stored in traditional clay amphorae.