The title of the piece for 17 February could just as equally apply to today’s. Changes. Changes to bars and cafés, changes to the personnel. Don’t go somewhere for a few weeks, and – what do you know – there are new people running the gaff. So it is with Café La Sala in the old town of Alcúdia. Trevor and Stuart have gone, taking with them the almost howlin’ wolf Nanouk. When I was dishing out those awards at the start of the new year, there should have been one for “dog of the year”. She would have got it, hands – or paws – down. You don’t get too many dogs with husky genes knocking around Alcúdia. But change is a constant. When was it? Three years back probably. At La Sala one day were Trevor serving, Stuart in the kitchen, and on the terrace would have been Dave and Mel from Oxygen, Ben and Michelle from Jacks, Guy and Jo from Es Cantó. All of them gone. Transient is the word I think. Mallorca is impermanence.
La Sala is one of those cafés blessed by location. Opposite the town hall, it generates good passing trade as well as that from the “ayuntamiento” and local businesses. It also has sufficient terrace space for a double line of tables, something that some of the other cafés do not have. The new owners, Frederick and Emmi, were saying that here there is a security with a café that maybe is absent elsewhere in Alcúdia, The Mile most notably. Like Trevor and Stuart, they are very nice people, and they plan to go more into a bistro line that the guys themselves had been talking about. I wish them well. They’ll do just fine.
Also opposite La Sala is Sa Cisterna, one of Alcúdia’s best shops – if you like local sausages and meats and wines that is. Salvador, who has not changed, is sort of what you expect a purveyor of meats to be like. He has the broad-beamed presence of a butcher, the bib of a meat-handler and a huge knowledge of the produce he is only too happy to impart. We got around to talking about white wines that he stocks in his bodega, my bemoaning the lack of anything that decent in the supermarkets; it will be two to three weeks yet before the 2007 vintage starts to come in. He was talking also about the differences between island and mainland wines and particularly about price. A good bottle, be it white or red, from the mainland will generally always be two to three euros less than an island one. The reason lies, mainly, in costs and capacity of production. Mallorcan land is that much more expensive than that of much of the peninsula’s wine-growing areas where volume (economies of scale I guess) is achievable; much of Mallorca wine production is boutique by comparison, and carries a price tag that reflects this. He showed me a decentish bottle of white from Catalonia. Less than five euros. You would pay that for an uninspiring plonk in the supermarkets.
In parts of the island, it is possible to get wine from the “chap who comes round”. It’s like in England in the days when the Corona man used to turn up every Thursday and you would buy the week’s lemonade and exotic flavours such as cherryade and the Corona “cola”. My very old Mallorcan neighbours have another house in Sineu. Every week they take their flagon or whatever it is and get their “vino negro” (black equals red). Works out about 2 euros a litre they said. Another neighbour tried some. Like vinegar, she reckoned, which was perhaps a tad uncharitable as they had given her a bottle for free. I’ll stick with Salvador.
Café La Sala, C/. Major (opposite the town hall), Alcúdia.
Sa Cisterna, C/. Cisterna 1, (next to the town hall), Alcúdia.
QUIZ
Yesterday – “Help”, The Beatles. Today’s title – one word´s missing, but it was a big hit at the end of the ´70s for?
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