Bodegón Nigro

Bodegón Nigro is an Argentine restaurant in the north of Palma, a few streets above Plaça d'Espanya, and it has been cooking on the island since 2024. In Argentina a bodegón is not a fine-dining address but the neighbourhood tavern: big portions, tables close together, recipes you know from home. That is what this house is built on, and it is run by its Argentine owners, who work the room themselves. It is also small. The room fills quickly, and anyone turning up without a booking often ends up back outside. Nobody dines in reverent silence here: you hear the next table, the service moves fast, and the plates coming out of the kitchen are meant for two. That is not a flaw in the concept, it is the point of it. What Bodegón Nigro puts on the table The biggest chapter of the menu is headed "Che, ¿compartimos?" — mate, shall we share? — and it means it. That is where the milanesas live, breaded veal escalopes that are not a side dish here but the centre of an evening. The Milanesa Nigro arrives with pizza sauce, mozzarella, sautéed mushrooms, pancetta, spring onions and fried eggs; the Napolitana is plainer, with tomato and cooked ham; the Fugazzetta carries onion and black olives. The Ratona adds cheese sauce, crisp bacon and fried eggs, the Gaucha provolone, chimichurri and roasted peppers. There are also versions with spaghetti in truffle cream, or with gorgonzola cream, walnuts and red onion. All of them are veal and come with chips or salad. If you would rather have the meat in one piece, order the matambre de ternera a la pizza. Starters, empanadas and the two-per-person rule To begin, the menu lists mollejas al verdeo, veal sweetbreads in spring onion sauce. Alongside them: matambre arrollado, rolled beef flank with chimichurri mayonnaise; provoleta, melted provolone with chimichurri and roasted peppers; and fried sorrentinos filled with burrata and red pesto in a Parmesan cream. From the house preserving jars come tongue in vinaigrette, chicken escabeche and pickled aubergine. The empanadas are made in-house and expressly rationed: a maximum of two per person, as the menu states. The choice includes the salteña with knife-cut beef and the traditional sauce of northern Argentina, the criolla, one with onion, mozzarella and black olives, a capresse, and one with braised vacío and provolone. Pasta, dessert and Argentine wine The pasta runs under the heading "like grandma used to make" and is no concession to non-Argentines but part of the same immigration story the milanesa comes from. The ravioli are filled with vacío braised in Malbec, the sorrentinos with pumpkin. The desserts are made in the house. The chocotorta is layered from chocolate biscuits, and the vigilante sets sweet potato paste beside a piece of cheese, an Argentine classic. Tiramisú and banoffee sit next to them. The wine list has a clear accent: Malbec and Cabernet Franc from Mendoza, a Torrontés from Salta, and beside them Spanish whites from Rueda and Rías Baixas. The neighbourhood and the second address The restaurant sits in a residential quarter north of the old town, between the shopping street Blanquerna and the old slaughterhouse grounds of s'Escorxador — Palma without the postcard view, but with an after-work crowd from the surrounding blocks. There is a second address in Palma under the same name, on Carrer d'Andreu Feliu, but that one is takeaway only. If you want to sit down, you want Carrer del Pare Bartomeu Pou.