El Rinconcito del Norte

El Rinconcito del Norte is a small place in Palma’s old town that brings the cooking of northern Spain into a quarter where the default is Mallorcan and Mediterranean. The house describes itself as a Casa de Comidas — an old Spanish term for an eating house without airs, where the point is the food rather than the staging. The name means roughly “the little corner of the north”, and it is meant literally. The house names Santander and Cantabria as its style, which is to say the Atlantic north coast of Spain. That is a different register from the island’s: heartier, more meat-driven, built less on olive oil and tomato and more on cured meat, eggs, beef and the conserves of the Cantabrian Sea. The menu makes no secret of it. It gets by with few sections — raciones to share, a heading of its own for nothing but huevos rotos, the meats, a green section and homemade desserts — and the headings have a sense of humour. The egg section is called “Rómpete los huevos”, the green page quotes Lorca’s line “Verde que te quiero verde”. Above them stands the sentence the house introduces itself with: good fresh produce, dedication, and love for what you do. What comes to the table at El Rinconcito del Norte The declared speciality is the cachopo, filled with cecina and goat cheese. The construction comes from Spain’s northwest: two flat pieces of meat enclose the filling, the whole thing is breadcrumbed and fried until the cheese inside softens and the crust outside cracks. It is meant for sharing, not for one plate alone. Of equal standing beside it are the huevos rotos. The principle is known all over Spain — potatoes, fried eggs, something hearty on top, and everything broken up as it is served — but here it gets a section to itself with several versions, among them one with octopus, gambones and mussels. It reaches the table in the pan. The meat section holds entrecôte and solomillo, the fillet often in the company of Cabrales, the Asturian blue cheese. Among the raciones you will find anchoas, as befits a house with Cantabrian ambitions. The desserts are homemade, and behind the counter stand northern Spanish drinks such as patxaran and kalimotxo. The rules of the house The Rinconcito is small, and it makes no secret of that either. Its own menu states that every dish is prepared only once it is ordered, together with a request to bear with the wait. Anyone wanting to eat fast and move on has come to the wrong place; anyone wanting to stay seated has come to the right one. Reservations are taken seriously — the house itself points out that it works by reservation. With this number of tables that is no formality but the condition for getting in at all. On top of that comes a rule printed on the menu that you rarely see stated so plainly: one single bill is written per table, and separate bills are not done. Anyone arriving as a larger group settles the arithmetic among themselves. The menu itself you call up digitally, by code at the table. A small place in the La Llotja quarter Carrer de Vallseca lies in the quarter around the Llotja, Palma’s Gothic merchants’ exchange, a few steps back from the water. The quarter is well visited, but the lane itself is quiet — it is not one of the axes along which the flow runs down from the Born to the cathedral. Which suits the business exactly. An eating house with a northern menu, a handful of tables and one bill per table needs no passing trade; it lives on people coming back and bringing acquaintances along. That the cathedral, the S’Hort del Rei gardens and the Passeig del Born are all within walking distance anyway makes the address one of the most convenient in the old town.