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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Great restaurants in Ibiza: Santa Eulalia del Río special

Santa Eulalia is one of the favorite spots for families on Ibiza's east coast. Many of Ibiza's greatest restaurants are located here. Es Terral, for example, works with fresh market produce and local food from Ibiza

Calle San Vicente, Santa Eulalia del Río. Popularly known as “the one next to the town hall” or “the street of restaurants.” Santa Eulalia is a tranquil municipality with excellent access to the island’s interior and north. From Santa Eulalia, we can reach San Carlos, San Miguel, San Lorenzo, or Portinatx, all of which are surrounded by dense forests of pine trees, red land, and carob tree landscapes. There is an unending array of coves and beaches along Ibiza’s east coast, including the popular Cala San Vicente, Cala Martina, Cala Nova, Cala Boix, and Cala Mastella. There are numerous possibilities, with varying degrees of rock, that are both accessible and isolated. Remember to check this list with the best 6 beaches to go with kids in Ibiza.

Historically, the municipality of Santa Eulalia del Río benefited from a diverse foreign tourism that sought shelter on the island. Ibiza and its villages appeared to be frozen in time to those eyes. The humble family taverns, unpaved roads, reddish ploughed fields, and traditional rural architecture, the casa pagesa, were a romantic experience for international visitors who considered this section of Ibiza as a time capsule as early as the 1930s. It carried them away to a vanished paradise that no longer existed in Europe’s modern capitals.

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Grocery store in San Jaime street, just behind San Vicente street and where today stands Es Terral. D.I.

The location: Santa Eulalia del Río

One of the most accurate portrayals of Santa Eulalia del Río can be found in Elliot’s Paul Life and Death of a Spanish Town. This is a 1937 book that condenses the events leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War while living in the microcosm of this fishing and farming community. 84 years have transformed the town urbanistically, broadening its extensions and integrating new families who, after the tourist boom of the 1950s, were looking for the promised land in the Pitiusas: the dream of a better life in front of the Mediterranean Sea. Surprisingly, just a stone’s throw from the town hall plaza, there are still the taverns that Elliot Paul wrote about and frequented almost a century ago: Can Cosmi and the Royalty.

A famous street of distinctive restaurants has been formed in Ibiza’s rich biosphere. From the intersection with Carrer de sa Bastida to the junction with Isidoro Macabich, there are almost 200 metres of restaurants and bars of all types, styles, countries, and proposals. The aromas of several cuisines converge in the pedestrian street’s center from one side to the other. Oriental cuisine combined with Thai curry, freshly cooked Italian spaghetti with smoked guanciale, or sweet and sour notes with fried pork from the Chinese restaurant. A liquor cellar, a classic fishmonger around the block, a gourmet shop offering Iberian products, traditional Ibicencan inns, tapas cafés, Indian gastronomy…

Among the lush flora and fauna of Ibiza’s restaurants, there’s a quiet terrace next to Can Toni Sendic, a shop displaying Ibizan handicrafts. We arrive at our destination, Es Terral, at number 47 San Vicente street. The couple that runs the place welcomes me into their house: chef Matthieu Michel Savariaud and the other half that makes up the heart of Es Terral, Sandra Aseijas – the caring soul that embodies a real individualized service. To break the ice, I pose the worst interview question possible: “How do you describe Es Terral?”

The place: Es Terral

Matt responds quickly after a few laughs: “Sandra created a hashtag named Ibiza meets France (#ibizameetsfrance). Es Terral is a cocina de mercado (fresh market cooking/cuisine du marché from Paul Bocuse’s work) for the people of the area. Essentially, it is opening our home to others by bringing those small details of attention that may be found in luxury hotels.”

Matt knows from his experience working in luxury hotels both on and off the island that the key is to adjust accordingly to your clientele. “Adapting is all about knowing what your client needs and what they want, and how can you put it into one sentence? Well, then, market cuisine!” Matt concludes with a wide, spontaneous smile.

Es Terral is a place where everything happens on the spur of the moment. Its essence is to create a menu that is diametrically opposed to every other restaurant on Ibiza. Seasonal produce arrives first, according to nature’s laws: vegetables from the Ibizan cooperative Ecofeixes and fresh fish from the neighborhood fishmonger, Can Rosa. Then, depending on what arrives at the restaurant – which can change from day to day, week to week – we find one menu or another on the blackboard outdoors. Sandra describes it with unforced candor, defining Es Terral as “a restaurant like my grandma would have. Cocina de mercado (cuisine du marché, or “fresh market cooking”). It’s a restaurant that operates in the opposite direction as the others. Typically, the menu is created first, followed by the purchase of the product. Well, we buy, and then we make the menu.”

Premonition fulfilled: as soon as I ask them about the type of clientele developed over the past seven years, a woman with a British accent enters, who appears to be a regular at the restaurant. She brings a basket of organic vegetables from her garden, which was planted according to the lunar cycle. I’m taken aback when I see her handing them various vegetables and some gorgeous courgette blooms that Matt will prepare for the evening. “The unique thing about the restaurant,” Matt says as he bids his future diner farewell, “is that it is highly dedicated to the people.” There is no such thing as cheating. It’s designed in our likeness. It is our way of being.”

1st of May, 2014: 0 place settings

Seven years is enough time to tell many stories, the depth of which cannot be expressed in a single conversation. Let’s go back in time: Es Terral first opened its doors on May 1, 2014. Matt and Sandra remember it perfectly: they opened with all the enthusiasm in the world, and exactly 0 covers. Sandra recalls the events as “strange” describing how “you begin with a gourmet proposition that was not suited for this area. Matthieu arrives, a French chef, just magnificent, anything you want. But they have no idea who you are. And you start at 40 euros for a wild boar cutlet with a lime and hazelnut crust. And we had to open because we had no other choice since our resources were running out. “

The initial plan was to create a large menu that was broken into several little seasonal meals. Setting up tables with the idea of everyone sharing. Always at the service of seasonality, and focusing on a very cheerful table that would mix numerous influences: Ibiza food, French cuisine, oriental touches… Everything that the Mediterranean has connected for millennia. The disadvantage was that “this was not recognized at the time,” according to Matt, “there was a lot of British tourists and, for example, ordering a chicken at the same time as having a starter to share… Well, no, people were not used to sharing.” It was a natural adaption and the unwavering support by word of mouth that propelled Es Terral into the spotlight of Ibiza’s restaurant scene, particularly those in Santa Eulalia, “suppliers, shops from the surrounding area who came to eat, the guy who sold us the wine from next door…”

Love and respect for the product of Ibiza

How can a little island like Ibiza offer such high-quality products? The combination of natural produce and Matt and Sandra’s concept creates a marriage in Es Terral that few restaurants on Ibiza can replicate. The passion with which they both approach Ibiza’s ingredients is palpable, from citrus fruits and its preservation to seafood and the traditional sobrasada. Matt’s list is inexhaustible, a compendium of Ibizan produce he loves: courgettes, wild strawberries, spinach, lettuce, apricots, pebrassos (Ibizan milk-cap), and so on.

My cuisine is made up of multiple small elements that I arrange like a puzzle based on what’s available,” he explains, mentally analyzing the impossibility of describing all of the Ibizan ingredients he likes and employs. “You combine sobrasada with coriander and Ibizan octopus… W onderful. It’s perfect for the season… Suddenly, we have a friend who brings us raspberries that have been planted locally. You cry because they’re so good, so delightful! However, they only last two weeks. It’s a delicate product. And because Sandra ate half of it while driving…” Both stare at each other with the complicity of an unbreakable marriage, of another fusion of parts that, when combined, produce something new and promising. Beautiful. We all burst out laughing as we looked at each other. In addition to an emphasis in produce from the island, this Ibiza restaurant provides other high goods. They bring cerdo Duroc and Galician beef from the north of Spain. They also have duck magret and foie gras from the southwest of France. Delicacies in the heart of Santa Eulalia.

By word of mouth

Thanks to local word of mouth and the positive reception of its cuisine by tourists, Es Terral was positioned at the top of TripAdvisor in Ibiza in a few months of that frenetic 2014, ranking among the 20 best rated restaurants in the Balearic Islands.

This unexpected revelation was followed by a series of terrific surprises, including a Gambero Rosso recommendation, the arrival of the first clients owing to the extremely reputable Lonely Planet guide, and mentions in Petit Futé, Routard, and other prestigious guides. Three years later, Es Terral is recommended in the Michelin Guide 2017, the same guide that granted them the first Bib Gourmand in the Pitiusas this year.

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Roasted “Juriola” with a courgette and its flower, white wine and lemon. ROMUALDO ABELLÁN (ARKHÉ STUDIO)

Finally, the Consell d’Eivissa welcomed Matthieu to the Primer Foro Profesional de Gastronomía del Mediterraneo (First Professional Forum of Mediterranean Gastronomy) because of his commitment for authentic cuisine and respect for the product, culture, and the local community. Journalists, experts, and culinary critics were all enthralled by this presentation: “You get into a different, more local interaction,” the chef explains, “you meet other restaurateurs… You notice Es Terral in the media and newspapers… This is favorable to business.”

We end the interview and move on to other conversations that the recorder will no longer hear. We talk on the concept of good cuisine, truthfulness when acting, and the pursue of joy in life. In the context of the global Covid-19 framework, the 2021 season for restaurants in Ibiza may be strange, unusual, and complicated. Despite everything, Matt and Sandra keep their doors open. With the same zeal, with the same devotion. Any tourist, local or foreigner, eager to taste the gourmet pleasures in this charming restaurant “like my grandmother would have had” on Calle San Vicent, 47, will be greeted with a comforting smile. So now I wonder: what Elliot Paul would have stated in his writing after visiting Es Terral…?

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