Ritma Mallorca

Ritma Mallorca is a small restaurant in Fornalutx, and the setting already explains part of the appeal: you eat on an open terrace above the Hotel Can Verdera, right in the old village core, looking out over tiled roofs to the slopes of the Serra de Tramuntana. Fornalutx has fewer than eight hundred inhabitants, and mass tourism has passed the village by. The man behind the house is Marcos Servera, and he came to cooking late. For years he worked for a Dutch company that supplies businesses around the world with their soundtrack, before he changed direction, trained at the Basque Culinary Center and went into a kitchen in Galicia. Ritma began as a nomadic brand for private events; only the meeting with the owner of Can Verdera gave it a fixed address. The word has stayed: cocina nómada is what Servera calls the thing he does here. The Guía Repsol lists the house as a recommended restaurant. Two larders, two seas Servera works with two larders, Mallorca and Galicia, with the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in between. Beside the menu lies a small blue map on which every product is given its origin: the place, the producer, often the name of the person who supplies it. Red prawn and octopus come through a fishmonger in Palma; mussel, cockle, lobster and kombu from the Atlantic; beef from Galicia; and egg, cheese, oil and bread from the island — the bread from an oven in the same village. For some fish the boat and the fishing ground are named as well. That precision is not decoration. Every morning Servera drives to Palma himself and picks the fish, and that expressly includes what other island kitchens leave lying: small, bony, unremarkable species treated as by-catch. From one of them he makes his jamón de mar, cured in sugar and salt and served with a house ponzu. Fermenting, pickling and maturing are not a fashion here but craft that needs time. What is on the menu at Ritma Mallorca The menu is short and stays in motion. A few dishes are fixed, above all the croquette of black Mallorcan pork with a tartare of gambusí prawn on top, and the gyozas, which fill the Asian dough shape with carabinero prawn and sobrassada. The tortilla stays soft inside and arrives with teriyaki, house kimchi and brioche. The baby octopus is finished over the embers and seasoned with Sichuan pepper, which prickles on the tongue. There is exactly one rice, cooked creamy in the greixonera, the Mallorcan clay pot, and only from two people upwards. What Servera brings home from his travels lands here too: every year he spends about a month in another country. From Mexico came the aguachile, the tacos and an onglet with mole, along with a sorbet of green tomatillos that he grows in his own kitchen garden. The tacos are filled entirely from Galicia and wrapped in a tortilla of Millo Corvo, a near-vanished dark maize from Pontevedra; you eat them with your hands. Alongside, the kitchen bakes exactly one focaccia a day with lacto-fermented cherry tomatoes and rosemary — once it is gone, it is gone. Terrace, access and booking Ritma is an entirely open-air house, and it takes that seriously: if it rains, the kitchen stays cold. Guests are welcome from fourteen years upwards, and Servera does not take parties larger than eight, because the rhythm of the service would be lost. He often carries the plates to the table himself and tells you where the produce came from. Asking about the recommendations that are not on the menu is almost always worth it. The wine list is looked after by Cristian Bestard and follows the same logic as the food: it stays with Mallorca and Galicia. On the Mallorcan side there are native varieties such as Prensal, Giró Ros, Mantonegro, Callet, Gorgollassa and Escursac, on the Galician side Albariño, Godello, Treixadura and Mencía. The terrace is small, so booking is the safe option — the house runs its own reservation system.