GUSTAR Restaurante

GUSTAR Restaurante sits on Plaça del Banc de l'Oli, a small square in the middle of Palma's old town that you tend to come across rather than look for. Busy Plaça Major is only a few steps to the south, and yet it is quiet here. The square wakes up when the places around it put their tables outside. In the middle there is a round patch of green with orange trees, and sitting in their shade you barely notice how close the city centre is. The cooking is Mediterranean with a Latin American streak that makes no secret of itself. Alongside the cod brandade and the slow-cooked veal cheeks there is a prawn ceviche on the menu. The menu itself stays deliberately short: a good dozen dishes, plus recommendations that are printed nowhere. What holds the house together is obvious the moment you step inside. A wall of bottles, Spanish and international wines side by side, wooden tables in front of it. GUSTAR Mallorca: grown out of a wine shop It started with the wine selection. The owners put together what they liked and served cheese and a few small things alongside. Over the years those small things turned into proper dishes, more carefully worked, made with seasonal produce and carried by a menu that changes when the supply changes. The tapas have gone, the wines have stayed. That origin explains why the service works differently here than in many old-town places. Ask for a recommendation and you do not get a stock answer but a suggestion that fits the dish you ordered. The same attention shows elsewhere: every dish on the menu is marked with the allergens it contains. What is on the menu The starters show the range well. A cod brandade comes with a piquillo pepper sauce, alongside an aubergine carpaccio with truffle oil and almonds and a prawn carpaccio with ginger oil. There is a selection of five Spanish and international cheeses, Iberian ham and cecina de León, the air-dried beef from north-western Spain. The spicy quinoa salad with yoghurt and tomato chutney and the smoked sardine toast with aubergine caviar show that the thinking here is not only classical. Among the main courses the Mediterranean meets South America. Prawn ceviche with mango, sweet potato and avocado sits next to grilled octopus with potato cream, garlic and paprika. Then there are saffron prawns, Iberian pork loin in a salt crust with cauliflower sauce and leek confit, veal cheeks in red wine with vegetables and crushed potato, and confit cod. Six main courses, no more. Alongside the printed menu run dishes that appear on it nowhere: freshly grilled squid, homemade cannelloni, a vitello tonnato. Which of them turns up depends on the time of year. The desserts, too, are recited at the table rather than printed. The wine list For a house of this size the wine list is unusually long. Reds, whites and a rosé are poured by the glass, and by the bottle there is considerably more. Priorat and Rioja stand next to Ribera del Duero and Toro, Jumilla next to Montsant and Cigales, together with whites from Rías Baixas, Ribeiro, Bierzo and Penedès and a Basque txakoli. France is represented, and so is cava. Mallorca has its firm place: several island wines sit as a matter of course among the mainland bottles. This is not a list kept for decoration. It is what remains of the wine shop, and it explains why the question of the right wine at GUSTAR is not meant as an upsell but as part of the meal. Plaça del Banc de l'Oli: setting and surroundings The square takes its name from the Middle Ages, when a bank for the olive oil trade stood here. What remains is the name and a calm you would not expect at this point of the old town. In the middle are the orange trees, whose fruit a neighbourhood initiative harvests and turns into marmalade. The GUSTAR terrace sits right in front of it, small and without fuss. Inside, the place is modest in size and the wine wall defines the room. All around lie the lanes between Plaça Major and Carrer de Sant Miquel with their shops, bars and usual traffic, and one corner further none of it can be heard. That is exactly what makes this address.