Eating out

It is perhaps the restaurant culture that really differentiates the expatriate and the person who wants to live in the Spanish style. If you want to remain British there is no shortage of restaurants that offer the food you would expect to see on the menu in the old country.

If you want a full English cooked breakfast this is readily available the length of the coast. If you enjoy a traditional English Sunday lunch with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding you will have no problems in finding a suitable restaurant. Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, and virtually every other cuisine you might hanker after is available on the coast but there may be very few restaurants which actually serve Spanish food. Go five miles inland and the food will be Spanish with some difficulty in finding an alternative.

As I write this chapter I have just returned from a most wonderful Sunday lunch in a Spanish restaurant ten miles from the coast. My fellow diners were almost totally local residents and there was not an empty table in the entire restaurant. The food was wonderful and very reasonably priced as we discovered when the bill arrived – about the same price as a steak house menu in the UK – but it was a truly Spanish lunch. Salads of various types as a starter some with local sausage included, chorizo, followed by main courses which included wild mountain rabbit, wild boar, lamb chops, local fish, game and a huge selection of other local produce but everything on the menu was cooked in the Spanish style with lots of olive oil, tomatoes, vegetables and herbs and no French fries to be seen on the menu. In this same restaurant the bread was locally produced, freshly baked and still warm from the oven.

I would have to say that many of my fellow residents on the Costa del Sol would not enjoy such a lunch because it was not traditional English and they would be unwilling to try some of the delicious dishes on the menu. This is the difference between living here as someone who wants to experience Spain and someone who wants to live the expatriate life in the sun. There is a place for both but you, the reader, must decide what you want in your life.