DAICA restaurant & turisme d'interior

DAICA in Llubí is a restaurant and a turisme d'interior in one, housed in a traditional Mallorcan village house right in the middle of the old centre. The name is made up of the first names of the couple who run it: David Ribas is in the dining room, Caterina Pieras — Cati to everyone on the island — is in the kitchen. They have had their own house here since 2012, and you can tell it is not a side project. Llubí sits in the Pla, the flat middle of Mallorca, away from the coast roads and their traffic. That plain has always been the island's pantry, and that is exactly how Cati and David describe it for their restaurant. Much of what reaches the table comes from the surrounding land, in season and, where possible, organically grown. The Guía Repsol lists DAICA with one Sol. The Michelin Guide includes the house but gives it no star — a distinction that blurs easily in conversation and that is worth keeping straight. The kitchen at DAICA in Llubí Cati Pieras cooks Mallorcan and Catalan at the same time. She was born on Mallorca, David Ribas in Catalonia, and that double origin is not a marketing figure but something you can taste: old island recipes read through the craft both of them learned in well-known mainland kitchens before opening their own. Food is served only as menus; there is no à la carte. The Temporada menu follows the season and puts the produce at the centre, while the Festa menu is the longer and more daring run. A cheese course can be added to either. The clearest picture of how this house works is the Faraona a la Señorial: guinea fowl, slowly braised, with olives. Cati Pieras did not take the recipe from a book but had it passed on by word of mouth from neighbours in the village — a grand old braise from another era, carefully adjusted to her own hand. Dishes like that are the core of DAICA, not the exception. Alongside them stands whatever the island and the sea provide. The menus turn up llampuga with cuttlefish when the dolphinfish is in season, langoustines in their own juices, baked artichokes with truffled egg, or lightly smoked octopus. And marinated pork with an old-style picada — served with capers from Llubí, which in this village is more than an ingredient note. The house, the village and the capers The building was once the village grocery. Ribas and Pieras restored it without taking its character away: stone walls, wooden beams, two quiet interior rooms and a patio that is laid for dinner on warm evenings. Anyone who has sat in a Mallorcan village house knows how cool those walls stay even in summer. Llubí itself was for a long time Mallorca's caper village. The fields around it produced such quantities that a local cannery employed a good part of the neighbourhood. That the capers of Llubí now appear on the menu of a distinguished restaurant in the same place closes a circle nobody could have invented. The house also holds a turisme d'interior — the legal term for accommodation inside an established village centre. So if you would rather not leave the wine standing, you can stay. Service, wine and tone David Ribas runs the room as host and sommelier. The wine list is built towards the island and rounded out with Spanish growers, without ever turning into a prestige catalogue. Teas and infusions arrive at the end, a small gesture that suits this house. The tone is warm and unforced. DAICA belongs to the upper price bracket but does not behave like it: no ceremony, no fuss, just a couple who explain what they cook and then get on with cooking it. Book anyway — the house is small, and nobody driving in from Palma or the coast wants to find a closed door.