We’ve just got back from a week in Cadiz. We loved it. It is a city at the end of a piece of land, surrounded by water, all bleached and peeling, looking out onto the Atlantic. It is old in the way that some people are old: not particularly interested in hiding it. The buildings are faded and the streets narrow. Laundry hangs from balconies, shutters sag, bars are dark and busy. It is a functional, working port city not unlike Palermo. There is something wonderfully uncurated about it. A chaotic, cheap, unrenovated space with some quite beautiful beaches attached to it.
Cádiz is a great place to do very little. This is not an insult. Most holidays are improved by having fewer things to do. You walk around and eventually end up in a bar for a little tapas and a tinto de verano or clara con limon, leave, get lost, and do the same before it’s siesta time. I personally found the late mornings, sleep, and late dinners pattern to be infuriating but there is something wonderful to be said for arranging life around being alive rather than getting things done. The food is exactly what you want from a place like this. Fish, prawns, tuna, ham, sherry. The food is either raw or dropped into hot oil, and this is obvious from the locals who, like their world class tuna, are either lean or fatty. We ate extremely well for very little money, with this a little snapshot into what we had.
Taberna Casa Manteca
This is the sort of place British restaurants spend enormous amounts of money trying to recreate. They put up old photographs, find some distressed wood and employ a designer. Casa Manteca doesn’t have to recreate anything. It has simply carried on. We went twice; both times ignoring the queue for an outside table to cram in against the bar, the first time better than the second.
There is little narrative to the food; it is proudly Cadiz and that is it. Fritters of baby shrimp, salmorejo (gazpacho’s thicker, more direct sibling) with either ham and egg or tuna and olive oil ice cream, good croquettes, smoked tuna, local cheeses, potato salads, the lot. It is quite wonderful to spend time in and easy to see why it is so popular.
La Marea
La Marea is the sort of restaurant that makes you wonder why we have spent the last twenty years pretending that seafood needs improving. It doesn’t. You order fish, you get fish. The sea does most of the work, which is lucky given the location. The cooking is salty, simple and generous. Over a lightish lunch Sophie had what she thinks might be the tastiest thing she’s had this year; chargrilled tuna ribs with a ginger and lemon bomba rice. My lunch was almost as good; a singular potato and onion tortilla that comes with bread, mojo sauce, and a punchy aioli. What a combo. Throw in a stellar tomato salad and you have the best food on the trip.
Ventorrillo El Chato
So interesting it is getting a full piece of its own.
Mercado Central de Cadiz
I’m calling it; this is the best Mercado I have been to. Way better than the performative likes of Borough Market, or those dreadful touristy ones in Madrid and Barcelona. Of course tourists come, and of course someone has discovered that markets are good places to take photographs of food (like me), but this is still fundamentally somewhere people come to buy lunch. And it shows in both the produce and the price. From the world class Gadisushi with its thick and dark slices of tuna sashimi, to the lady selling triple cooked chips with salsas, and El Gato Gordo – a place I visited thrice – with its kebabs and durum wraps that creep in at around a fiver. It’s not all perfect; a paella stand was fairly average, and El Carbon burger remarkably like Rustlers, but it was affordable and fresh and you can’t really want more from lunch.
Bar La Tabernita
The one that all the locals told us about, in the trendy La Vina neighbourhood, around the corner from Manteca. To call this simple tapas would be an injustice, but that is what it is.The best croquettes, more of those shrimp fritters, hake and prawns in green sauce, potato salad with tuna, chicken meatballs, chickpeas with spinach, and cheese stuffed aubergine with tomato. It’s affordable, high quality, and very friendly. Everything comes with excellent chips and our bill was about £30. What’s not to love?
Taberna La Manzanilla
The sherry is the point. Cold, salty and faintly medicinal, it is designed specifically to be drunk beside a plate of anchovy stuffed olives while standing up. It’s not a restaurant, but I fell slowly in love with it, despite Pepe insulting my choices of sherry every night (“it’s for old ladies”, and “you should feed that to your Grandmother” were two of my favourites). But with this being a food blog, I should point out that should you ever find yourself here – and you absolutely should – order the olive oil crisps and have them seasoned with 95 year old sherry vinegar at the bar. All other crisps are herewith redundant.
La Taberna del Chef del Mar
El Puerto del Santa Maria is a pretty twenty-five minute boat ride from Cadiz and forms one corner of The Sherry Triangle. Here you will find Angel Leon’s more casual sibling to his three star restaurant. The ethos is still the same, it is all fish, most treated and cured to replicate meat, with zero waste and an appetite for stuff like plankton. We had a very light lunch with pani puri of green gazpacho and cured sea bream, a quite brilliant tuna flank with slow cooked tomato sauce and some really excellent puddings. By Cadiz standards it is expensive, and yet very cheap compared to the 400 euro tasting menu at Aponiente.
On the Thursday morning of our holiday we were walking a loop of the Old Town when we stopped for a quite dreadful coffee in a pretty park. It was here that they had a statue of Carlos Edmundo de Ory, with the poet moving gracefully across the floor from the pedestal leaving footprints on the ground. I joked with Sophie that it looks like my Dads best mate, unaware of what had happened just hours earlier back in Birmingham. Sleep well, Con, and thanks for looking after my old man in the eleven years since Mom has passed.
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