By David Farley
Hear the word “Rioja” and the first thing that comes to mind is wine — high-quality, fruit-forward red wine.
But there’s another side to this small region in northeastern Spain: family-run restaurants in quiet villages atop craggy mountains or surrounded by farmland. You won’t see signs boasting Michelin stars; instead, you’ll find a constellation of flavorful, rustic dishes and extremely affordable and drinkable wine that you can rarely find outside of the region. It’s served by people who treat diners like out-of-town family friends who just happened to pop in for a three-hour lunch. Driving there is half of the fun, as roads snake through rolling, vineyard-clad hills and alongside verdant mountains.
Here are five restaurants that will give you a rich taste of La Rioja.
La Cueva del Chato
In Spanish, “chato” refers to someone with a flat nose and the chato in question here is chef César Torrecilla, who doesn’t have a particularly flat nose. “That was my father,” he said. “I’m el chatito,” he added, using the diminutive. Located in the tiny village of Canillas de Río Tuerto (population 42), about 25 miles west of Logroño, the capital of La Rioja, the restaurant is run by Torrecilla and his wife, María Isabel Hermosilla, who works the front of the room.
I came here with my Logroño-born wife, Ivana, and her family — six of us in all — and by the end of the meal, Hermosilla had memorized our names.
The menu is filled with rustic goodness, including white asparagus smothered in a mushroom sauce; a stew of caparrónes (a local red bean) studded with slices of morcilla (blood sausage), pork belly and chorizo; foie gras salad, essentially a heap of rich and delicious foie gras; and the menu’s tour de force, an enormous bone-in chuletón, or rib eye, which diners cook by placing the raw steak on portable grills sitting on the table.
Torrecilla, who grew up in the village, is the son and grandson of farmers and decided as a young man to carve out a new path for himself as a chef and restaurateur, converting the garage that was used to store the family tractor into a restaurant with four distinct dining rooms, all on different levels.
La Cueva del Chato, Camino Torrecilla 1, Canillas de Río Tuerto, +34 941 416 148. Lunch or dinner and drinks for two about 80 euros (about $89).
Bodega Pimiento
As Marimar Porres put a thick piece of just-off-the-grill morcilla on our table, she said, “Morcilla, it’s the sushi of Rioja.” Porres, who co-owns and runs Bodega Pimiento, a 50-year-old restaurant in the village of Tirgo, works the dining room while her brother and co-owner, Pablo Porres, oversees the grilling of meat and vegetables in the enormous walk-in fireplace in the dining room.
Housed in a late-18th-century stone building with wooden ceiling beams, the dining room has long wooden tables and benches. Nearly everything edible comes from the nearby farm-and-vineyard-blanketed countryside. The jamón Ibérico and chorizo are house-cured, the vegetables are grown in the restaurant’s garden, and the lamb is from a local farm.
If you request a physical menu, they’ll give you one, but servers prefer to recite the short compendium of what’s being offered that day. The food is Rioja to the core: bowls of patatas a la Riojana (chunks of potatoes and chorizo bobbing in a smoked paprika broth); grilled morcilla stuffed with pig’s blood, lard, onions and rice, that pairs nicely with a side dish of sweet roasted red pimientos; and the meal’s main event, suckling lamb chops — chuletillas al sarmiento — cooked over dried vine shoots, making it an ideal companion to a bold Rioja vintage. In our case, we chose a 5-year-old Crianza from the local winery Caecus.
Dessert was a heaping plate of cream-stuffed eclairs.
Bodega Pimiento, Calle Salvador 8, Tirgo, +34 941 30 17 77. Dinner and drinks for two about 80 euros.
Casa Comidas Irene
If you’re willing to brave the narrow, mountainous road that twists along the border of the La Rioja and Castilla y León regions, you’ll be rewarded with views of tall, green mountains dotted with grazing cows, and a luscious lunch in the quiet village of Viniegra de Abajo, population 78. In her 20-seat spot with wood-beamed ceilings and large photos of sheep on the walls, Irene Sobrón and her two-woman team cook up hearty, inspired fare.
Casa Comidas Irene, which first fired up its burners in 2013, offers up a lunchtime menu del dia, a three-course meal, plus house wine for 22 euros. Sobrón said the lunch menu — which is delivered verbally tableside by Ana Montero, the restaurant’s only server — doesn’t change often, so diners will likely be offered something similar to what I feasted on: timbal de patata, a bowl layered with uncased chorizo stuffing, mashed potatoes, with a fried egg on top; and a tureen holding a hearty stew of smoky chorizo and red beans.
For the main course, we ate tender pig trotters in thick tomato sauce, three large pork meatballs in a slightly sweet orange sauce, and a very intensely flavored venison dish slathered in a mushroom sauce. For dessert, try the torrija, a French toast-like bread that’s been dipped in egg, pan-fried and sweetened with honey.
Casa Comidas Irene, Calle Josefa Martinez 10, Viniegra de Abajo, +34 941 37 82 21. Lunch and drinks for two about 44 euros.
Casa Tila
When husband-and-wife-team Manuel Ruiz and Ana Isabel Diaz opened Casa Tila in an 1882 building in the hilltop village of Clavijo (population 300), they conceived a menu with Spanish staples. And then one day someone asked Ruiz, the Rioja-born chef, what his particular specialty and favorite local dish was. He shrugged and thought about it, realizing he often ate rice dishes growing up. So, he put a rice-based dish on the menu. It was a hit. So much so that when diners called to make reservations, they specifically asked for the rice dish.
“We now have six rice dishes on the menu, and it’s become our specialty,” said Diaz, who works the five-table dining room.
The rice dishes have to be ordered in advance — online through Casa Tila’s website or via telephone — and include a large paella pan filled with creamy Albufera rice from Valencia, cooked in a broth of Rioja wine, garlic, onion, leek and cognac and then topped with a whole cockerel (a young, male chicken) slow-cooked with smoked butter and rosemary; a surf-and-turf version with venison and shrimp; and one that includes candied pigs ear, Iberian pancetta and morcilla.
There’s also a tapas menu: sauteed artichokes in a silky potato purée with toasted corn kernels; salmorejo, a popular soup from Córdoba in southern Spain, although Ruiz’s version substituted a tomato base with peas and ling fish roe, which imparts a fresh, bright flavor.
The short wine list includes bottles from small Rioja winemakers — so small, that even my La Rioja-born, wine-geek dining companions had not heard of many on the list. We drank an excellent Tempranillo, Garnacha and Carignan blend from ZaRuGa, a winery in the medieval hill town of Briones, about 25 miles northwest of the restaurant. For dessert, we shared ice cream made from Basque idiazábal cheese from Logroño-based ice cream maker DellaSera.
Casa Tila, Calle Don Marcial 8, Clavijo, +34 655 24 57 53. Lunch and drinks for two about 120 euros.
Alameda
“This is not a restaurant,” a diner at the next table told me at a recent lunch. “This is a temple of gastronomy.” I heeded the words of the diner who happened to be Martín Berasategui, one of the most famous chefs in Spain, whose restaurant in neighboring Basque country has three Michelin stars. Berasategui said he comes here twice a year.
Alameda, in the town of Fuenmayor — near the Ebro River and the La Rioja-Basque Country border — is run by husband-and-wife team Tomás Fernandez and Esther Álvarez. Fernandez mans the charcoal grill, which diners can see via large windows, and Alvarez oversees the kitchen. Before opening Alameda in 1988, Alvarez learned to cook at her family restaurant Mesón Chuchi, also in Fuenmayor; Fernández had been a farmer.
The restaurant is known for its wine list — which includes bottles from 120 local wineries — and its grilled 40-day-aged rib-eye steak. Álvarez and Fernández have long been buying their beef from Luismi Garayer, a butcher in the Basque Country, whose specialty is older cows from the region of Galicia. The meat is less tender than that from a calf, but much more flavorful — as I discovered when the barely medium-rare, bone-in hunk of steak appeared at our table. The slightly chewy, yet flavor-popping meat is the best steak I’ve eaten in Spain. The cocochas, or grilled hake chins, were also revelatory: The server recommended eating each of the 10 specimens in one bite, letting the flavor — a combination of smokiness from the grill and saline from the sea — burst onto one’s palate. Which it did.
Alameda, Plaza Félix Azpilicueta 1, Fuenmayor, +34 941 450 044. Lunch or dinner with drinks for two about 180 euros.
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