Brands like Ralph Lauren and Carolina Herrera have long embraced the equestrian scene to sell luxury products. Beautiful people, wearing beautiful clothes, gambolling around beautiful landscapes on beautiful beasts screams aspirational lifestyle. If you want to live it for real, if only for a brief time, head to Vall de Cavall restaurant nestled in the deep countryside of the Marina Alta south of Dénia.
It’s the kind of place you’re unlikely to stumble upon as an outsider. It’s tough to find even if you know where you’re going; most drivers on the road winding though this mountainous region would be concentrating too much on the twists and turns to notice the small sign on a one-track lane that leads across the valley. Follow it, however, and you’ll come to a traditional Spanish ranch house clothed in bougainvillea and surrounded by stables, paddocks and horses. The surrounding peaks make the rest of the world feel very, very far away.
Like most of our experience along the coast in this region, the mood and the clientele are pan-European. So is the management: owned by a Belgian-born professional equestrian and his Spanish wife, the kitchen run by a Moroccan head chef. Yet this felt a good deal more Spanish than anything along the coast, and even though the menu is best considered “international fine dining” the amount of pork, saffron, Spanish wines and regional Spanish dishes sinks the kitchen’s roots deep into its valley.
I started with grilled octopus with creamy potatoes and crispy ham. It was a beautiful dish and the tricky cephalopod was perfectly cooked. The ham was a great match (everything’s better with pork…) but I could have done without the potatoes which made the dish overly rich and fought with the octopus to be the star of the show. It couldn’t come close to the African interpretation I wrote about last month.
The real headliner of the first course came on the side; delicate filo pastry wrapped around what tasted like the inside of a chicken pastilla, shaped and presented like branches of an exotic tree.
I went for a Spanish classic next and opted for the suckling pig. Beautifully presented and as succulent as you’d expect…
but the winner of this round was clearly our friend who went with oxtail in Pedro Ximenez sauce. This was comfort food of the highest level; the kind of thing that makes you roll your eyes in ecstasy the moment it hits your tastebuds. The sweet sherry provided a balance to the fatty meat while keeping everything lusciously moist. (The pig, on the other hand, could have used more sauce.)
I’m tempted to try both at home, given that I saw someone picking up a suckling pig at our local farm shop last time I was in, but I suspect the oxtail is less tricky to get right.
Vall de Cavall presents a challenge for the dessert lover. The portions are so enormous, and much of the food so rich, that it is almost impossible to contemplate a third course. We paused for a while, letting glasses of Crianza aid our digestion while we appreciated the interiors. Spanish hacienda style with cosy furniture, enormous fireplaces, terra-cotta floors and an art collection featuring horses from a range of artistic traditions, ancient Chinese to near-abstract modern. We moved outside … probably waddling rather than walking … for coffee on the patio. Because it was my birthday and our wedding anniversary, a chocolate cake glistening with mirror glaze beneath a miniature Roman candle spouting sparkles arrived at the table as the waiting staff surrounded us to sing. Despite the stuffed stomachs, we managed to clear the plate. It would have been rude not to.
To accompany the chocolate, we drank in the ambiance. Umbrellas filter the Mediterranean sun. A swimming pool offers the glitter of water. Mountains loom. Bright flowers scramble over stone walls flecked with the same rusts and greys of the mountains. You could sit happily for a very long time. Horsey people, no doubt, were gambolling about in a paddock nearby. I, simply borrowing the lifestyle for an afternoon, soaked it all in and gave thanks to our friends who inducted us into this local secret of the good life.
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