The Puerto de Santa María, a step away from the capital Cádiz -steamboat- is a first class gastronomic destination, an open seafaring city, with a personality marked by the coming and going of ships and passengers, by the wineries and by that something intangible but unmistakable Atlantic.
You shouldn't come to El Puerto on the way, but rather with the intention of exploring its gastronomy, the one at its roots, but also the creative one: the daily one and the one of absolute exceptionality. As versatile as the city, its relationship with food is a summary of western Andalusia, by the sea, with its own accent, which makes the city a place to always return to, because there will always be one more bar to explore or a new restaurant that interprets this legacy from his personal point of view.
These are our addresses to start immersing yourself in the gastronomy of Porto:
The statement is valid for the city, but it would surely be valid for the province and for the entire south of the Iberian Peninsula. If there is an essential restaurant here, it is Aponiente. And it is for making a way of relating to the environment, with the bay, with the marshes, with the estuaries and with the ocean his own, and he is capable of bringing all this to the plate.
Aponiente doesn't look like anything. It cannot be understood without the commitment of Ángel León to translate the local seafaring baggage into a contemporary language, to seek new possibilities for seafood cuisine and to do so with elegance, restraint and a certain radicalism. A unique place that is worth knowing if you have the opportunity.
Tohqa resists adjectives and explanations. Cádiz and Porto cuisine, yes, but also much more than that. The proposal by the Pérez brothers, Eduardo and Juan, explores the local imaginary -not only the gastronomic one- and reformulates it into iconoclastic dishes, sometimes provocative, always thoughtful, which are accompanied by a selection of equally personal and eclectic local wines .
Tohqa is patio and fire, it is a way of interpreting a gastronomic baggage respecting its wickerwork and turning everything else upside down.
Puerto Escondido is already, after 7 years, a consolidated bet in the city, a more casual alternative to the big houses that explores a kitchen with one foot in the local tradition and the other in traveling proposals attentive to trends.
Located in an 18th century porter's house, the restaurant run by chef Pablo Terrón offers dishes such as shrimp salad with egg and juice from their heads in amontillado sauce, octopus with pickled onion and purple potato purée or sautéed squid with prawns and corn gazpachuelo.
La Taberna del Chef del Mar is the most daily project of Ángel León. Although this does not mean that it is a project in which the chef's personality is diluted. On the contrary: we could say that La Taberna is the spirit of Aponiente stripped of all the additions of a great gastronomic restaurant.
The restaurant is located in the same place where Aponiente was born, where it got its first two stars, and proposes a kitchen, as they themselves explain, "with a seafaring soul, with products, with spoons and with a lot of dipping bread."
La Taberna is the perfect place to take a look at Ángel León's cuisine for the first time or, if you have already been to Aponiente, to return to it from a more casual perspective through proposals such as squid stuffed with black pudding, swordfish belly muffin with fermented gherkin juice or red tuna skin tripe with marine chorizo and egg mollet.
Bar Gonzalo is one of those lifelong bars that have recently been recovered by a new management that has managed to maintain the atmosphere of the usual bars and a kitchen offer that plays along that line and behind which a lot of trade can be guessed. .
Impeccable fried foods -mullets, sourdoughs, anchovies or a dogfish that is accompanied with a tasty adobo mayonnaise- a classic salad of those that you always want to repeat, some tasty potatoes with choco and some other different proposals such as cod with Iberian meunière and mojama shavings or sea bass with clams and salicornia velouté.
It is a good idea to arrive in El Puerto in the morning, to start the day at the market and have breakfast nearby, whether it be some Charo churros, which are bought at the small counter next to the market door, on Muñoz Seca street , and are enjoyed on the terrace of any bar in the area, or with a toast and a coffee at Bar Vicente "Los Pepes", just on the other side, on Calle Abastos, with that atmosphere that seems suspended in time.
From here, it is worth going to buy bulk wines at Bodegas Obregón, or perhaps at the small office of Bodegas Gutiérrez Colosía, on the banks of the river, where you can also buy wonderful vinegar. If the option is the latter, La Dorada, one of those timeless bars, always messy and tapas, without an iota of updating, is one step away: seasoned roe, grilled cuttlefish eggs, fried prawns, seasonings...
From there, continuing with the more classic tapas route, perhaps it is worth finishing off at Er Beti, a classic on Misericordia street, specializing in traditional stews in which offal plays a prominent role: menudo, tomato tongue, livers of chicken, blood with onions... If you prefer something of a different style, it is worth trying their fried foods, their potatoes seasoned with tuna or the choco and prawn meatballs.
Juan Ruíz Henestrosa, the former head of the Aponiente dining room, decided some time ago to take a leap into another gastronomic format. He did it with Little John Burgers and Things, a cherished dream for years, perhaps because of his people's ties to American gastronomic traditions.
The result has been this project in the heart of Rota, 20 minutes from El Puerto, in which Juan and his team run a hamburger restaurant conceived by someone who has worked alongside Abel Valverde, Ángel León or at Hacienda Benazuza and who is National Gastronomy Award. A burger joint, but not just any burger joint.
Little John does not work frozen or fifth range, he makes everything at the moment, uses breads from the award-winning bakery La Cremita de Chiclana and proposes hamburgers that range from the most classic to different preparations such as Fuahhh!!! with Asturian Friesian meat, black angus jerky, fresh foie gras and perigueux sauce. A different experience that is also part of everything that happens in the gastronomy of this corner of Cádiz.
