Contrabando Llucmajor

Contrabando is a tapas and wine bar on Passeig de Jaume III, right in the middle of Llucmajor. The town sits in the south of Mallorca, inland behind the coast, and has kept its everyday life intact: a small market town with workshops, where restaurants are built for the neighbours rather than for coach parties. That is where this house stands, and it makes no secret of where it comes from. The name is no accident. For decades after the Spanish Civil War, Llucmajor and the Mallorcan Llevant were the capital of smuggling, and the decor plays with motifs that recall it. What arrives at the table, by contrast, is entirely straightforward: tapas to share, produce from nearby, Mallorcan wine. The kitchen is open to the dining room, and the house says why: behind every plate there is real work and fresh produce, and you are meant to see both. What Contrabando in Llucmajor puts on the table The menu runs two lines side by side. On one are the classics no good Spanish bar can do without: ensaladilla, croquetas, boquerones and anchoas, pimientos de Padrón, banderillas. On the other are the dishes the house claims as its own — tartare of tuna, beef and salmon, chicken wings in barbecue sauce, pulpillo de roca, gratinated zamburiñas, pork fillet with sobrassada. In between sits everything that carries an evening here: marinated fish and meats, boards of cold cuts and cheese, salads, and the ous romputs, the broken eggs, of which the house keeps several versions. Anyone who wants a paella orders it a day ahead. Three dishes show how the kitchen thinks. The pork fillet medallions come with grilled sobrassada and artisan honey. The chicken skewers get a satay sauce made not from peanut but from Mallorcan almond. And the red prawn carpaccio carries the house name in its title. At the end it turns emphatically local again. Alongside tiramisù and banoffee stands a carob mousse, made with algarroba from Es Garrover de Mallorca, a producer with roots in Llucmajor. A dessert cannot get much closer to the town than that. An open kitchen and baskets on the counter Walk in and you see the kitchen first, and the counter in front of it. On it stand woven palmito baskets of seasonal fruit and vegetables — peppers, courgettes, lemons, tomatoes, waiting to be cooked. That is the house's calling card, before a menu ever reaches the table. The room has Mallorcan character without playing rustic: sunshine-yellow walls, patterned floor tiles in the manner of the old local ones, wine racks, mismatched chairs, a bicycle strung with lights on the wall. In front of the entrance, behind a wooden fence, lies a small terrace with a few tables. The wine list stays deliberately Mallorcan too; the house says itself that it comes from home. Behind all of it is Miquel, the owner, who works in the bar himself and takes hosting seriously. The bar that turns up in a crime novel Contrabando has a sideline you would never guess from a tapas bar. The author Pete Davies has written four crime novels set on Mallorca, and this house appears in all four; Miquel himself features in them as well. A row of those books stands in the bar. For the evening at your table none of that matters. But the chain fits: a bar named after smuggling, in a town that was once its capital, which ended up in a crime novel.