The hotel wanted to know if we needed help with reservations so we reel them off, one-by-one, from the list on Sophie’s phone. What we get back is mostly advice; we’ll need to get to Manteca early, and same with Chef del Mar, and La Marea should be fine, but just book it when you get to the beach in the morning. El Chato? We will need to book El Chato and you’ll need a taxi because it is too far to walk. Fast forward four days and we are back in reception, thirty minutes earlier than our taxi is booked, asking if it is possible to go there now for a mooch about to see the surrounding area. No, they say, there is no point, there is nothing around El Chato. Nada. Zilch. Zero. You go to El Chato to eat and then you come back. It is the way.
He is right. Our fifteen minute taxi takes us quickly out of the old town, and through a strip of high-rise hotels which line Playa de la Victoria. We keep going towards San Fernando, onto a narrow breakwater that has a slip of beach on one side and a highway (the same one that we are driving on) on the other. Ventorrillo El Chato appears out of nowhere, white-washed and burgundy trimmed, like an Americana diner with taste. And yet it somehow works. The restaurant has this strange ability to make the road feel irrelevant. You hear it occasionally, a rush of tyres and engines, but mostly it’s just the wind and the waves. There is no way this place would still exist in the UK. It would be a Starbucks by now.
We settle downstairs amongst the rendered walls and history. It is full and the clientele seem that little bit more well heeled, from the elderly couple behind me with cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders to the couple clad in tattoos and Gucci. We have vermouth whilst we wait and then a bottle of wine that could have gone to school with my wife. The service is curt, quick, classically continental. They speak as much English as I do Spanish. A potato salad arrives. You see a lot of potato salads in Cadiz. All have red onion, some with tuna, others with shrimp. This is just waxy spuds, onion, loads of olive oil, and a little parsley and chervil. It is by far and away the best example we had in that week, mostly because the olive oil is so great, but also because they know when to stop. They have bread to put most starred restaurants to shame, light and bouncy and properly proved.
I have salmorejo to start. It’s gazpacho if gazpacho were a meal and not something you can get as a drink option in Spanish McDonalds. It is tomatoes, bread, olive oil and garlic, blended until they become a thick paste, then served cold, this time with ham and curds of egg. The salty ham, the soft egg and the sharpness of the tomato turn what looks like something you’d feed a convalescent into a proper meal. Sophie gets the cheese and leek fritters with Pedro Ximinez sauce, which they suggest a half portion of and are right to do so. The leek is almost entirely absent, with this being all about the contrast between the crumby, lactic, and slightly sour cheese and the raisin sweetness of the sherry. It’s interesting, in the way that Tenet, Stonehenge, and being lost in a foreign city is, but I wouldn’t rush back for it again. Likewise my main that sounds so exotic in Spanish but transpires to be cubes of pork cheek in a stew-like sauce with chips. The cheek is cooked well, it is boldly seasoned, but meh. I think – no, I know – that I ordered badly.
Sophie gets the wet rice with carabineros. It is magnificent. The prawns are enormous, dark red, like something from the expensive end of a seafood nightmare. They taste extraordinary. Sweet, intensely marine and almost meaty, with a head full of concentrated prawn filth. The bomba rice is loose and bound in a majestic bisque made from the shells, whilst chunks of the prawns bob and perform. It is 36 euros. In the UK you could expect to pay double that and it’s probably worth that sum. Completely impossible to eat elegantly, but frankly who cares about elegance when cooking is this good and this assured.
Dessert is a blend of cava, lemon granita, and Spanish brandy that looks and tastes a bit like Yakult. So what. The bill is £165 for the two of us but half of that is on the wine, and, in an extra incentive, they pay one way for our taxi from Cadiz, saving us 17 euro which will practically buy dinner that night. So, the hotel was right. There is nothing around El Chato. There is no reason to go there other than to eat, and once you’ve eaten there is no particular reason to stay. Which, in an age where restaurants increasingly want to be destinations, experiences, occasions and Instagram backdrops, is rather refreshing. You get in a taxi, drive along a dual carriageway, eat some of the best rice I’ve had in a long time, drink a bottle of wine, get £17 knocked off the taxi and go home.
8/10
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