Smith's Kaffee Bar und Restaurant

Smith's in Port d'Alcúdia is one of those places that resists a single label: café, bar and restaurant in one, at home on the bay of Alcúdia since 1987. It began at a different address with little more than breakfast and small lunchtime dishes. Today the menu runs from a snack to fillet steak and the fresh fish of the day. The character of the house lies exactly in that breadth. Smith's is not a concept restaurant with one signature and three dishes, but an all-rounder that takes its versatility seriously — the place where a family with four completely different appetites all eat well at the same table, without anyone having to swallow a compromise. What is on the menu at Smith's There is a proper Spanish and Mallorcan corner: pa amb oli with Serrano ham and Mahón cheese, sobrasada toast with honey, huevos rotos with sobrasada, pimientos de padrón, choricitos al vino, patatas bravas and prawns cooked in oil with garlic and chilli. Alongside them stand the British holiday classics the house has carried for decades: fish and chips with tartare sauce, Texas ribs in a rich BBQ sauce with homemade coleslaw, beef stroganoff made with fillet of beef in a creamy onion and mushroom sauce, and scampi in batter. From the grill come sirloin, fillet steak, fillet of pork and chicken breast, with peppercorn, béarnaise or roquefort sauce. For two or three people there is a mixed meat grill and a mixed fish grill with sea bass or sea bream, tuna, salmon, calamare and prawns. The burger list is strikingly long and named with humour — the Goatfather arrives with goats' cheese, the Rock 'n' Roll burger with bacon and blue cheese. Then pizza, pasta, a noodle wok with peanuts and a mildly spiced curry. To finish, homemade chocolate brownies, cheesecake in strawberry or honey and walnut, apple pie and pancakes. Gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan For a house of this size, the gluten-free offer is unusually serious. It is a menu of its own rather than a footnote, and it covers a large part of the range: burgers with their own bun, pizza, pasta, steaks and dessert. The kitchen works with a separate fryer, and the staff distinguish coeliac disease from intolerance instead of lumping the two together. That comes back consistently from the coeliac community, and in a holiday resort with constantly changing guests it is anything but a given. The vegetarian section stands on its own: a vegetable wok with peanuts, a sweet potato and chickpea curry, and spaghetti pomodoro. The veggie burger comes either with a homemade patty or as a Beyond Burger. The salads do more than usual too, the Green Energy Salad among them, with chickpeas, beetroot and pumpkin seeds in a honey and cider vinegar dressing. A house with convictions Ecology is not a marketing add-on at Smith's but an old theme. The house asked for a glass recycling bin for the street very early, long before recycling was routine in hospitality, and it now carries the eco-tourism mark of the municipality of Alcúdia, a local environmental label for hotels and restaurants. Reusable items are preferred, regional produce is bought wherever possible, and the plant-based dishes have grown over the years. The consistency of the multilingual work is striking as well: the menu is published in a good dozen languages, from German, English and Spanish through French, Italian and Danish to Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and Ukrainian. Smith's is run by the owner herself, who answers guest feedback personally — which explains a good deal about the tone of the house. You can reserve through the restaurant's own booking system, and on the bay of Alcúdia that is no bad idea in high season.