Taberna Laloma - Villamartín

Merluza stuffed, secret at low temperature and tender angus, all spectacular. always a good choice!

All very good, excellent food good raw material and good attention, spectacular lamb, very good ribs and merluza filled squisite

We came to this restaurant and bar for an 6pm dinner, early by Spanish standards, having found nowhere else open. Free parking outside, we started off with a regional favourite, tortillas de camarones, shrimp fritters, which were hot and crispy followed with another fishy dish ‘canutillos de langostinos’ bigger prawns wrapped in dry crispy batter cones with smoked paprika dipping sauce. We then had a plate of small fresh artichokes that came with chopped ham. Our final dish was mollejas, lamb sweetbreads with chips which my partner enjoyed. We recommend Taberna Laloma if you want to try regional dishes in a friendly informal restaurant that is also terrific value.

Had our usual favourites ‘Canutitos de langostino’, prawns in crispy batter tubes with lashings of smoked paprika mayonaise and simple ‘gambas blancas’, delicately flavoured white prawns you just peel and have with lemon. We decided to add to our repertoire and also ordered ‘vieiras rellenas’ and ‘delicioso de cerdo’ this time as well. The ‘delicious de cerdo’ was 2 large portions of slow cooked pork that came with home made chunky chips and meat juices and lived up to it’s delicious name. The ‘vieiras rellenas’ wasn’t so good, I imagined it as a Spanish version of coquilles st jacques but unfortunately this wasn’t the case. What came looked the part but was smothered in way too much sauce with very little in the way of scallop and prawn which was a real shame. I don’t know what goes on in the kitchen, it’s hard to imagine that the same person who can cook such accomplished dishes like the prawn dishes and pork dish can also be the same person who creates such a bad dish as the stuffed scallop one!

Another great lunch here, sadly they didn’t have any white prawns so we had their crispy prawn tubes with paprika sauce instead which are one of their best dishes (canutitos de langostinos), Russian salad made with tuna, we also had scrambled egg with baby broad beans (revuelto habitas) which was rich and delicious. Where we came unstuck was with their croquettes, 2 of us being non-meat eaters we went for the garlic mushroom ones only to find flaky meat inside. We called the waiter over to verify this was the case and he seemed to know nothing about them containing any meat, so it seems that the kitchen sometimes just rather generously adds other things to them, and despite using my best Spanish it’s hard to explain to them that lovely and generous though that is, you can’t just do that without letting people know, and that now 2 of us couldn’t eat them because of it. I do think it’s a cultural thing in this part of Spain, they have no concept of vegetarianism. Lovely dessert too, slightly too cooked chocolate fondant with intensely flavoured mandarin sorbet.