Restaurant Celler Ca'n Costa Alcúdia

What a celler is — and what Ca'n Costa makes of it

Celler comes from the Latin cellarium, the storeroom. On Mallorca the word long meant a house's wine cellar: a sunken room with thick walls, barrels and presses, where at some point people also began to eat. Many of those cellars became inns, and the term travelled with them. Today celler on Mallorca stands less for a room than for a kitchen — for stews, oven dishes and rice. That Alcúdia belongs in this story has a reason: in the Middle Ages the island's wine growing was concentrated in Inca, Alcúdia and Felanitx.

Whether wine was ever stored in this particular house, Ca'n Costa does not say. What it has to show is something else: the kitchen, the family and a building older than almost everything around it. Here the name is not a costume but a statement about what comes to the table.

The kitchen: frit, arròs brut and bacallà

The menu reads like an inventory of Mallorcan home cooking. To begin, pa amb oli and allioli, trempó with shellfish, sopes mallorquines — thin slices of bread softening in a vegetable broth — and tumbet of aubergine, potato and tomato sauce. Frit mallorquí arrives with lamb, liver, potatoes and herbs, its seafaring counterpart frit marinero with shellfish.

Among the fish, much revolves around bacallà: cod fillet gratinated with garlic and honey, with roasted red pepper, or with sobrassada and honey. Alongside it, John Dory Mallorcan style with vegetables, raisins and pine nuts. From the oven come suckling pig and the shoulder of milk-fed lamb, and rabbit is served grilled or with onions and a prawn tail. Ask the house for a recommendation and exactly three names come back: the gratinated bacallà, the lamb shoulder and that rabbit.

Rice takes time and company — the rice dishes are built for more than one person. Beside arròs brut, the spiced rice stew with several kinds of meat, stand the paellas: mixed, with fish and shellfish, as fideuà with noodles instead of rice, as arròs negre with squid ink. Vegetarians are looked after with vegetable paella, tumbet and grilled vegetables; the menu flags allergens, the desserts are made in house, and there is a small separate selection for children.

The house on Carrer de Sant Vicenç

The lane is narrow and car-free, and the restaurant makes use of that: some of the tables stand outside, a courtyard opens at the back, and inside you sit between stone walls. The building dates from the sixteenth century and has kept its proportions. Family pieces, antiques and old tools hang on the walls — so many of them that the dining room reads more like a small museum than like décor. As the house tells it, the Mallorcan poet Miquel Costa i Llobera spent his summers here.

Alcúdia has two faces: down at the port the long bay with its promenade and hotels, up behind the town wall the old town. Ca'n Costa belongs to the upper half. Like many houses in the north it takes a break through the cold months, and a table wants booking ahead — the place fills up reliably.

A wine list weighted towards the island

House wine by the glass and the carafe belongs to a celler. On the bottle list the island clearly dominates: Macià Batle, José L. Ferrer, Herederos de Ribas, Ànima Negra, Son Prim, Jaume de Puntiró. Rioja and Ribera del Duero stand alongside, but they are not the point. And at the end comes what has to come at the end of a Mallorcan list: hierbes, palo, canya, mesclat, brandy from Suau.