Avocado Mallorca | Brunch & Lunch | Coffee & Juice in Cala Major

Avocado Mallorca is a brunch and lunch place on Avinguda Joan Miró in Cala Major, where Palma runs out to the west and the road starts to follow the first coves along the coast. From the outside, a bright, modest room on a busy avenue. The difference sits in the kitchen, and it is more fundamental than a brunch menu suggests. The entire menu here is gluten-free. Not one section of it, not an alternative on request, but the whole house. The kitchen works with raw ingredients certified by the Spanish coeliac federation FACE, and because there is no wheat flour on the premises at all, the question of cross-contamination falls away. That is precisely the question that otherwise turns every holiday breakfast into a research task for people with coeliac disease. The second axis is the vegan one. The menu is conceived as plant-based, every dish can be ordered vegan, and salmon, chicken, egg or feta sit alongside as additions rather than the other way round. For a mixed group that is the real gain: you share at the table instead of negotiating special requests. What Avocado Mallorca puts on the plate The wraps are the calling card, with avocado and feta or tofu, with chicken or with Heura, the plant-based chicken substitute, plus mushrooms, courgette, guacamole and a spicy vegan mayonnaise. At breakfast the avocado toast with feta, pomegranate, poached egg, toasted seeds and soy vinaigrette sits next to a mango and avocado toast with vegan hollandaise, and a bread with fresh tomato, sundried tomato, rocket and olive oil. Then the bowls: açaí cream with granola, fresh fruit and seeds, or the same idea built on plant-based yoghurt. Among the salads the one with black venere rice, ginger, cucumber and papaya stands out, alongside a quinoa version with lentils and chickpeas and courgette spaghetti with pesto and toasted almonds. Sweet things run to a crêpe made with carob flour and Mallorcan almonds, and the desserts are conceived vegan, gluten-free and without refined sugar. Drinks are freshly pressed, with smoothies and organically grown coffee that you can also take home by the kilo. Beside them, organic teas, matcha, chai, golden latte and ceremonial cacao, with plant milk on request. The cook behind the idea Leonardo Simoni comes from the Veneto and studied gastronomy in Venice before he began to travel. What he picked up on the way he combined with what he had learned as a teenager in his grandfather's vegetable garden. Avocado grew out of that. At the first Balearic competition for vegan cooking, run by the chefs' association ASCAIB and the Vegan Chefs Illes Balears collective, he took third place. That explains a good deal about why the plant-based dishes here do not read as a duty exercise. The room and the setting in Cala Major The team built the interior themselves, the vertical garden, the lamps, the swing, the tables. The result is homely rather than styled, with space for families and larger groups. The same attitude reaches into the kitchen: organic produce and short supply routes rank high here. Cala Major is the first coastal spot west of Palma, with its own sandy beach and the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró right in the neighbourhood. If you want to eat after a swim without driving back into the city, this is the place, and if you would rather sit on the beach, you take it with you. There is delivery too. Anyone looking for more than a meal gets passed on to the network of personal trainers, nutritionists, osteopaths and physiotherapists that has formed around the place.