Welcome To The Pleasuredome

There is currently a "mostra" of Mallorcan cuisine going on. Mostra does not translate easily. Or rather it does, in that it means a "show", but that is not really correct. Better would be something like event. So, a Mallorcan cuisine event. It goes on around the island and is divided into three "routes", the second of which covers the north of the island next week. What it entails, and the event is now 25 years old, is that restaurants in or along the routes serve up some special menus to a maximum price of 12 euros. Good idea, you would think, and as it has been going for so long, you would believe that it would be pencilled into the calendars of restaurants and that it would be a major statement of Mallorcan gastronomy, of which one hears so much as a source of "new" tourism. You might think all this, but I'm not sure that you would be right.

Why, for example, is only one restaurant in the whole of Pollensa taking part? The list of restaurants in the north is fairly impressive, in terms of the names of the restaurants, but there are not that many. Most of them, seven, are across Alcúdia - from Meson Los Patos by Muro to the Mirador in La Victoria. This still doesn't answer why only one in Pollensa - Iru. I asked someone (Mallorcan) who is involved with various establishments and who has his base in the old town of Pollensa. The answer was straightforward. There is just too much of this. By that he meant that there is too much that restaurants are asked to take part in, to promote, to produce special this and special that, and at special prices. Twenty-five years ago it probably all seemed pretty simple. But not now.

You might argue, with some justification, that the restaurants should be only too willing to support anything that brings in more business. The point is, however, that there is a limit to what they can be prepared to support and to pay out for. And there is so much - of all types of promotion. If one genuinely believed that this mostra would drum up regular new business, then it would probably be worth it. But would it? I rather fancy that most diners are locals and locals who take the opportunity for having a meal at the sort of price you would pay for a menu of the day. What about tourists and the gastronomy tourists most obviously? Well, where are they?

This all comes back to the alternative tourism, to the niche markets. A letter to "The Bulletin" yesterday made some similar points to those that I made two days ago. I am heartened that someone else thinks along the same sort of lines. A mostra of Mallorcan cuisine should be, were Mallorcan gastronomy such a really big deal, a major tourism event, but it isn't. One needs to ask why not.


Sharp observers of this blog will have noticed that I use certain words quite a lot - like well, really, actually. Lazy in a sense, but I tend to write like I speak. In so doing, I trust that it may come across as sort of chummy. This is not my point though. What is, is that those three words all (like all) include a double-l. You may know that the Spanish are fairly keen on double-l's, like the Welsh. This l-love-in can be but one explanation for the regularity with which double-l appears erroneously. Famously, Playa de Muro has its own double-l that greets visitors, as in "wellcome". There is only one welcome with two l's as far as I am aware, and that is, or was, the Wellcome Foundation prior to its being swallowed (with two l's) up by Glaxo. Yet, the Spanish are keen to continue the tradition of this once fine example of an alternative style of British company structure (albeit that the Wellcome was American). Place mats, those paper ones you get. Wellcome, they say. Often. As at the excellent (two l's) Celler (also an l-duo) El Moli in Pollensa (double-l). Everywhere you go. The company gave the world the anti-herpal drug Zovirax, and it also gave the Spanish world a greeting. Wellcome to Mallorca - or make that Majorca, "Paradis-Insel" as the Germans would insist: the Pleasuredome, if only the tourism authorities could get the message right.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Brilliant. Gene Pitney, Tulsa. And he saw a "welcoming (or maybe wellcoming) light" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLRRdE6jUdY). Today's title - relax, don't do it.

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