Hidden Gem #9 – El Sol de Siena25th August 2016

Hidden Gems is an opportunity for us to let you know that we’ve recently been somewhere that really think you should know about it too!  It might be somewhere we’ve been going for a while, or something we’ve chanced upon for the first time.  It might be a restaurant, a bar, a beach…it could be anything at all that has reminded us just why we love living in Ibiza so much!

We hope you get the opportunity to check them out too.  If we’ve missed any – tweet us at @cm_ibiza with hashtag #ibizahiddengem

Half way up the hill of San Jose and open all year round, snuggles a little known gem of a place. Enter somewhere timeless and Mediterranean, with cool dark wood floors and solid wooden furniture and savour homemade warm bread and an amuse bouche. If you’re lucky it will be a lightly spiced beef with two delicate sauces in which to dip.

The menu has Italian notes (we are name-saking a Tuscan town), but not entirely. For starters there is a good compliment of pastas and carpaccio and also a nod to Iberia with tapas prawns and patatas bravas, but the warm prawn and spinach salad cannot be beaten.

For entrées, there are two kinds of steak, a very non-Italian and treacly, though not too sweet tasting, chicken yakitori and beautiful concoctions made from that day’s fresh fish – it may be a tuna tataki or a ginger infused tagine made from dorada (sea bream). If you’re a dessert person, the chocolate coulant will obviously fill the ring fenced afters space.

This chef would hold his culinary own in the grandest kitchens in any major capital and we are blessed to have him in San Jose, Ibiza.  There are a lot of repeaters here and it can sometimes feel as though you are at one of the owner’s private dinner parties as everyone seems to know everyone else. Expect a bit of chat between tables, mainly about sports or politics or German X factor… but for a cosy winter’s night or a cool escape from a hot summer’s eve, it can’t be beaten.

http://www.el-sol-de-siena.com/