Restaurants in Granada by David Clement Davies

"Quien no has visto Granada, No has visto nada," goes the adage, "Who has not seen Granada, has seen nothing." It is a city that boasts one of the most beautiful fortresses in the world, the Alhambra and, as the last bastion of the almost mythical kingdom of Al Andalus, even today it retains a fairy tale aura. It's certainly a place I have wanted to visit for many years, but in the end it wasn't the Nasrid Palace with its celebrated, impossibly delicate Arabic traceries, nor the flowering water Gardens of the Generalife that so stirred my blood, if blood can be stirred in August temperatures of 43 degrees in the shade. It was the discovery of quite simply the best restaurant in Granada.

If you stagger past the cathedral, down by the stalls into the touristy Plaza Bib-Ramblas, then take a right corner into the little square, you will find 'Cunini' and the finest antidote to gripes about Andalucian cooking anywhere. Cunini has been going strong for 50 years, as the exhausted security guard on the door seemed to testify, his ancient moustache wilting in the heat. From the enthusiasm of the customers jostling at its bar it will be going strong for another fifty at least.

Cunini is both restaurant and tapas bar - or technically
'Marisqueria', seafood shop - with tables outside and a clean, white, matter-of-fact dining room within. The restaurant is simple and elegant yet the smart clientele showing almost painful refinement at the tables didn't seem to be having half as much fun as the standing traffic, supping tapas among the green pillars and cool marble table tops at the bar. Then, without even taking a bite, as soon as you enter Cunini you can taste that most wonderful quality about eating in Spain, typified by tapas; the unpretentious, vigorous delight in which hungry Spaniards set about stuffing themselves.

Platters of fish and pigs’ trotters swung in and out of view, piles of crostini flashed past, the refrigerators groaned with ice-cooled snapper and lobster and from the tiny kitchen the service was fast and exciting, as the locals gossiped below the mirrors, downing endless beers and sherries, popping pods of the freshest flavours into their gobs and keeping up a patter as loud as carefree cicadas thrumming a thousand miniature guitars.

Cunini is famous for its tapas, so much so that on the morning shift between 12 and 4 o’clock, they have a completely different tapas menu, specialising in their own delicious potato and prawn croquettes. But it was past dusk when we arrived and the night shift had brought out platters of Havas con Jamon, beans with ham and 'Ensadilla Cunini,' another speciality, an excellent 'little' potato salad, as I chatted to the manager.

His warm and relaxed attitude typifies the whole style of Cunini and an unshakable confidence, both in himself and his business (Cunini is run as a cooperative) beamed from his face. He described proudly how Juan Carlos had visited their sister restaurant in the Sierra Nevada, which the cooperative have now sold to concentrate on their Granada business, then proceeded to explode the myth that you can't get a decent meal in Southern Spain. As I stood there trying more and more specialities and his voice and the evening thrummed around me, it no longer mattered that Granada's suburbs have swollen into an ugly modern city or that the exquisite walls of the Alhambra now house tourist shops selling computer generated images of you, the missus and the kids in an 'authentic' Seraglio. Granada's fairy tale had almost come true again.

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