Review: El Portal de Echaurren, Rioja

It’s always nice to pair a long weekend of wine tasting with a top-class meal, but for Rioja we decided to go totally overboard and book a gastronomic weekend at Echaurren. This involved an evening meal at 2* El Portal de Echaurren, a fine breakfast before a morning in the kitchen with chef Francis Paniego, a tasting menu at Echaurren Tradicion across the hall, and an evening meal at the E-Tapas Gastrobar. Massive, massive over-indulgence was achieved. The whole experience was very generous, with wine glasses topped up for as long as we kept quaffing and no limit set on the tapas we could have on our last evening. So I’d totally recommend it if you basically like eating and drinking above all things.

So how about the 2* tasting menu at El Portal? Well, this was my first Michelin-star experience in Spain, and if it’s any kind of an indication then we’re going to be returning to Spain a lot! Because this was exactly my kind of cooking: beautiful, inventive, light and popping with all kinds of zingy flavours. When there’s 15+ courses I can only talk about a few highlights…

There were a whole raft of pretty and delicious amuse bouches, but my favourite was a simple mouthful of whipped goat milk butter on a crisp green herb bread. Just filled my mouth with the most luscious dairy-goaty-creamy-ness and then lingered a while to make the glass of white Rioja taste even better than before. Some very good white asparagus followed, cooked sous vide so it still had plenty of bite. Teardrop peas were a new thing for me, miniscule and packed with bright flavour, rounded out with a potato and egg yolk and vanilla combo.

My absolute favourite dish was crayfish in walnut pil-pil. The crayfish was absolutely blushing baby pink and delicate, while the dusky sauce mingled strong flavours of walnut, crayfish shell and a hint of warmth. One of those “can’t I just have five more of these?” dishes.

Loved the splendid broth of their classic caparrones (red bean stew), loved the soft confit bacalao with rich red gravy, loved the little nuggets of glazed cow snout. After all that amazingness, desserts brought the meal to a fairly brief and sudden end. Refreshing pre-dessert with cotton wool and flavours of citrus and apple, and then a main dessert that was frustrating for being astonishingly delicious and yet really small; an angelic

pale cream sandwiched between tiny meringue slivers. And I darn well know the kitchen can produce wonderful patisserie ‘cos the next day our tasting menu at Echaurren Tradicion was topped of with an orgasmic little tart.

I don’t really mind, the whole savoury El Portal menu was long and exciting and brilliant. Smashing two-star cooking, though at 150 Euros for the menu I guess it’s probably about right for price, maybe even a tad expensive. The wine list is obviously heavy on the Riojas, and rightly so as there’s a bunch of great reds and whites on there for very reasonable sums. We were very well looked after and enjoyed the whole meal immensely.