Eat At The World's Oldest Restaurant In Spain Where Tasty Traditional Cuisine Is A Promise

In the course of the 21st Century, Madrid has blossomed into a notable foodie town to rival Barcelona, but one thing has been on the menu for centuries, and that's the suckling pig at Restaurante Botín, where the wood-fired oven has now been burning continuously for over 300 years. The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes it as the oldest restaurant in the world, and the building that houses it is even older, dating to the 16th Century.

In 1725, a French cook named Jean Botín, who had married a local Spanish woman, opened a tavern in the Spanish capital city. Quite incredibly, it's been in operation ever since, surviving the Spanish Civil War and, more recently, Covid-19. Even when the restaurant closed briefly during the pandemic, those fires stayed lit, and today, business is booming again, with dining rooms on four floors and an international following of patrons inspired by the traditional cuisine and the restaurant's place in literary history.

The restaurant's charmed history of nurturing talent in the arts and letters began early; the great 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya worked there as a dishwasher in his youth. In the early 20th Century, the Gonzalez family bought the restaurant, and has operated it ever since.

A young Ernest Hemmingway fell in love with Botín, visiting so frequently that he was given his own table. He used the restaurant as the setting for the final scene in his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," in which the characters feast on roast suckling pig and quaff rioja wine. With Hemingway's popularity, American tourists looking to retrace the steps of the glamorous Lost Generation in Europe flocked to Botín, and the restaurant's international reputation was solidified.

Mentioning Botín in novels became an international pastime for the literati. Novelists Graham Greene, James Michener, and Frederick Forsyth all gave the restaurant nods in print. In the early to mid-20th Century, it was also a gathering place for Spanish intellectuals, much like the Algonquin Round Table was for Americans in New York. One of those great Spanish writers, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, wrote, "It feels like Botín has always existed and that Adam and Eve ate there the first fried pork ever cooked in the world." And no doubt, when you make a pilgrimage to Madrid on your next road trip through Spain, you can eat fried pork there, too, with gusto.

Contemporary customers are divided on the cuisine, and that's really no surprise, as tastes have changed over the years, but Botín's menu hasn't. The signature dishes here include roast lamb and roast suckling pig, traditional dishes whose simplicity relies on the quality of ingredients and little else. That suckling pig, with crackling, crispy skin, is slow-roasted in that oak-fired oven with salt, pepper, onion, garlic, and bay leaf, then hacked into succulent tranches and served on a plain platter with a couple of humble potatoes swimming in savory, garlicky meat juices, a monochromatic dish that relies on you relishing its meatiness. Nothing here is plated with tweezers, of that you can be sure, so bring an 18th-century appetite and prepare to appreciate the Spanish tradition of the post-prandial siesta.

The restaurant's other vaunted dishes include a celebrated garlic soup, noted on the menu as containing egg and ham, and a traditional chilled gazpacho. But the sleeper hit seems to be the creamy, Basque-style cheesecake, which Tripadvisor visitors have called "life-changing" and "a masterpiece." If you're coming for the history, more so than the piglet, then be sure to book dinner and a private tour so that you can see the magnificent oven in person and maybe even sit at the table where Hemingway sat.