Es Brot

Es Brot sits on Carrer de la Vinyassa, a quiet side street in Palma's Llevant district, a few steps east of the Avingudes. The house describes its own work as cocina de mercado — market cooking, meaning whatever is good right now rather than the same card all year round. The room is small and has the cut of a neighbourhood bar, carefully furnished, with a few tables outside on the street. It is owner-run, and you notice that in the division of labour: the cook is also the landlord, and the team working the room is a small one. The crowd comes from the streets around — neighbours, people having breakfast before work, regulars who long ago filed the place in Palma under the short name Brots. Both spellings mean the same house; its own channels run as Es Brot Palma. Breakfast built to order at Es Brot Breakfast is the real calling card, and it works on a simple principle: you choose the bread, and you choose what goes on it — or, in the case of the llonguet, what goes inside. Several cheeses are on offer, poached eggs, scrambled eggs and whatever else fits. Alongside that, toasts, smoothies and homemade cakes. The llonguet is no ordinary roll. This oblong wheat roll with the deep slash across the top is Palma's own bread — so much so that the rest of the island calls the people of the capital llonguets themselves. Es Brot puts it squarely at the centre of what it does and fills it generously: a vegetarian version with tomato, lettuce, feta and avocado, for instance, with serrano ham if you want it. A menu rewritten every fortnight At midday the breakfast address turns into a kitchen with a mind of its own. The card stays short and changes on a two-week rhythm — regulars come back for exactly that, and a dish you liked may well have given way to another by your next visit. What is on it is more concrete than you would credit a breakfast place with: a cream of artichoke, leek and juniper with toasted bread and chives. Fresh artichokes in tempura with parsley allioli and spirulina. Homemade croquettes of oxtail and foie with an emulsion of purple carrot. A crisp skewer of prawn and sesame with sweet chilli. On the plant side, a vegetarian pita in the Greek manner, or black beluga lentils with seasonal vegetables, beetroot paste, tzatziki and avocado. The kitchen also ventures a long way from the island. Japanese yakisoba noodles with vegetables, ginger, crisp free-range chicken and a hot sauce have been on the card, as has a homemade coca of onion and olive oil with gorgonzola foam and figs — Mallorcan baking, thought through in Italian. To finish, a tiramisu or a chocolate dessert that works deliberately with salty contrasts. The room and its neighbourhood Llevant is a residential quarter, not a going-out quarter. Vinyassa runs between Carrer Aragó and Carrer del Bisbe Maura; eating here means sitting among apartment blocks rather than souvenir shops, even though Plaça d'Espanya and the big shopping streets begin only a few corners away. Because the room is small, booking is worth it — especially if you are coming as a group. If you are in a hurry, you can order and take it away. And if you have no Spanish, you will manage here: English is spoken at the table.