Blue Marine restaurant

Blue Marine sits on the harbour of Can Picafort, right where the quay wall runs into the town. The house sums up its own kitchen in one line — Mediterranean, facing the sea — and says in the same breath what it rests on: fish from the lonja, vegetables in season, ingredients from the island. That is a short claim to make about yourself, the kind a restaurant can be measured against, and the menu holds up. Can Picafort belongs to the municipality of Santa Margalida and lies on the long bay of Alcúdia. The place lives off the summer, and the promenade fills up accordingly. Blue Marine sits slightly aside from that flow, at the harbour basin: a small room with seats outdoors, from where you look out over the boats and the water. The view across the bay is the real reason to secure a table outside for the evening. One thing is worth knowing before you go: there is no paella here. The house says so itself, and firmly — it replied to a review praising a paella that the meal must have come from somewhere else. If you are after the big rice pan on this bay, you will find it a few doors along. Blue Marine is about something else. What Blue Marine puts on the table The evening often begins with a Mediterranean focaccia meant for sharing. After that it turns raw: tuna tartare and salmon tartare stand side by side on the menu, along with a prawn carpaccio. The dish the house is best known for is the tuna tataki — seared hard and briefly on the outside, raw at the centre — and it arrives with basmati rice. Out of the fryer come cod balls, served with a truffle mayonnaise. With the fish itself things get quieter again: sea bass with clams in a white wine sauce, with basmati rice and caviar alongside. That combination has been turning up in accounts of the house for years, and it is one of the plates people come for. Between the Mediterranean and the Far East The signature of the house shows where the Mediterranean base takes on Asian accents. The cod loin is served in a Thai curry sauce — a dish you rarely find on this coast, and one that together with the tataki sets the direction. An Italian line runs alongside, suited to the place without turning generic: risotto, pizza and a tiramisu made in house. There is a limoncello version of it too, and that one gets named more often than the classic. And then there is the suckling pig. On a menu that lives off fish, a slowly cooked piglet is a statement — and one of the reasons Blue Marine is hard to file under a single heading. The harbour as an address The room is small, and in the evening it is often full. If you want to be sure, book ahead. The outdoor tables are the sought-after ones, because they face straight onto the harbour basin; inside it is correspondingly quieter. The mood is unhurried and family-friendly without ever becoming a children's restaurant. If you are travelling the north of the island — between Alcúdia, Platja de Muro and the s'Albufera nature park — you will find a house here that takes its cue not from the holiday crowd but from what the lonja has to offer in the morning.