Restaurant Es Pati

Restaurant Es Pati sits on a residential street in Sant Llorenç des Cardassar, and from the outside you would almost walk past it. A terraced house like the others on Carrer Soler — except that a quirky painted hanging sign with a cat on it gives away that someone is cooking here. Inside, a Mallorcan townhouse opens up around a courtyard, and the courtyard is what the place is named after: in Catalan, "es pati" simply means the yard. Sarah and Felix run Es Pati as a couple. He cooks, she welcomes the guests and looks after the wine. You will not be handed a menu card here: there is exactly one menu, across five courses, and it is a different one every evening. That is not a marketing idea but the way the house works. Felix goes to the market in the morning, sees what is there, and builds the evening's menu out of it. Nobody knows in advance what will reach the table. A menu built fresh every evening Felix describes his cooking as international, with Asian and Mediterranean influences and a few recipes of the kind grandmothers cook. That is exactly how a menu here reads: a smoked parsley root cream to open, a crisp gamba with beetroot and pomegranate salad and cardamom, veal spareribs with oriental mango couscous and sprouts, a herb-crusted tenderstrip with truffled cabbage — and to finish, a Mallorcan almond cake or an orange rice pudding with tandoori strawberries. The wide span is deliberate. A trip to Africa brought Indian accents into the house, and samosas have turned up on the menu ever since. On other evenings it is Thai curry, mango or foie gras. The starting point, all the same, remains the island's local, seasonal produce. Felix has a practical argument for the fixed menu: only fresh goods come into the kitchen that way, and far less has to be thrown out. If you eat vegetarian or bring an intolerance, it is best to say so when you book — the kitchen will then put together a menu of its own. Children may pick something from the menu, and if nothing suits, Felix cooks them pasta. The house behind the hanging sign Indoors it is kept simple and still anything but plain: colourful pictures on the walls, and the brightly painted Mallorcan chairs with woven rush seats that the island has known for generations. A fireplace makes the cold months comfortable. In the warmer months you sit in the courtyard or on the covered terrace that looks onto it. At weekends tables are laid outside in front of the house as well, in the middle of the street — in a village like Sant Llorenç that works without feeling staged. Much of the appeal of the place lies in that. Sant Llorenç des Cardassar is a country village in the Llevant, a little way inland from the east coast. There is next to no passing trade here; anyone sitting in Es Pati made a deliberate journey of it. You can feel that in the evening. An evening at Restaurant Es Pati Sarah guides you through the evening and through the wine list. Her focus lies on wines from the island and from the Spanish mainland, and she picks what fits each course — with a surprise menu that is the more sensible order of things anyway. Es Pati is a dinner-only house, it is small, and it fills up reliably. A table should therefore be settled in advance. Because everyone at the table gets the same menu, the evening becomes a shared one rather than one where each person orders separately — which suits a house run by a couple with their own team.