El Pastoret

Restaurants are like life, the fewer the options the better; that way you don’t waste the future wondering if you made the right decision.

El Pastoret therefore is the kind of restaurant I like; you don’t have to suffer the neverending menu or plough through an excruciating selection of dishes that cannot possibly all be fresh.

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My friend Joaquin took me to El Pastoret, and this is a man who knows his restaurants, although for a moment I thought that a kidnapping was taking place as we turned onto an unpromising dirt track with no sign or apparent destination.

However, it turned out to be the car park behind this old, converted farmhouse that now houses three dining rooms and an ample covered terrace in the garden out back.

So, once seated, the no-nonsense begins and the unordered dishes start to arrive. First of all a couple of prawns and some toasted farmhouse bread accompanied by garlic mayonnaise and grated tomato.

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This is followed by a salad with fresh ingredients including tuna.

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Then comes a platter of cured meats and cheese; not your supermarket rubbish but quality stuff.

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Finally, when you are bloated and wondering if you should ask for the bill or do a runner, the spell is broken and you have to go for surf of turf, with as many as four, I think it was, options. Fortunately I don’t normally manage to retain more than two and so plumped for the foreleg of lamb, while Joaquin went for squid, both of which were prepared on the charcoal grill outside.

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The meat slips from the bone like a negligee.

Luckily the dessert was similarly brought without needless interrogation and consisted of various fruits, ice cream and tarts.

The wine probably had a list somewhere, but the Maître suggested a bottle and I was too relaxed to argue and not daft enough to ask for an alternative.

I’m not sure where El Pastoret is exactly but I know it’s near Joaquin’s house because he said so, and it’s not in Naquera, where there is one with the same name.

I can’t tell you how much it cost either as Joaquin played his usual dirty trick of paying for everything.

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I think I’m going to have to start sharing Joaquin. His phone number is…..damn, I ran out of ink!

El Pastoret: Carr. Fuente en Corts,