november-2011

MARI
CARMEN
Clockwise from top:
The Castle of Santa Bárbara,
viewed from Alicante city’s
Old Quarter; a taste of La
Sirena’s tasting menu,
with chef Mari Carmen Vélez
working her culinary magic
ALICANTE
Spain, particularly praising its arroz a
banda con gambitas (rice in a seafood
broth with prawns).
La Sirena is run by chef Mari Carmen
Vélez, who’s regularly included in lists
of women making waves in the macho
world of Mediterranean cuisine, along
with fellow Alicante chefs María José
San Román at Monastrell (7 Rafael
Altamira, Alicante, +34 965 146 575,
monastrell.com) in the city centre, and
Susi Díaz at La Finca in nearby Elche
(1–7 Partida de Perleta, Elche, +34 965
456 007, lafinca.es). For all the acclaim,
however, La Sirena has retained a
family atmosphere.
Vélez says she learnt about seafood
from her fisherman grandfather but,
when the tasting menu arrives, you
could never call it salt-of-the-earth
peasant food. It does include some
time-honoured classics, like grilled red
prawns (so succulent that the waiter has
to bring another tablecloth to cope with
the spillage), but it’s also full of her own
unique touches. The Galician octopus
comes with an exquisite depth-charge of
pepper and the tuna has a gorgeously
tender meatiness beneath a costra (crust)
of spices. This mixture of the old and
the new, it turns out, is the hallmark of
Alicante’s best chefs.
Just around the corner from La Sirena
another of Spain’s culinary superstars,
pastry chef Paco Torreblanca, has a
shop – Pastelería Totel (103 Avenida
José Martínez González, Elda, +34 965
388 224, torreblanca.net) – that must
dent the fish restaurant’s dessert sales.
Torreblanca became a household name in
Spain in 2004 when he made the wedding
cake for heir to the throne Prince Felipe
and his bride Letizia. He’s since become
known as the “Ferran Adrià of chocolate”
and his gleaming, almost futuristically
minimalist shop includes tarts and cakes
that look like works of art, with their
sculpted wings of fruit.
The same fruit looks almost as
succulent when I visit Alicante’s
enormous Mercado Central the next
morning. In most cities such an elegant,
modernist building would be a church or
a town hall, but here it’s a cheerfully
Thomas Cook Travel
65