Top 5 Madrid’s best restaurants for gluttons

Warning! Not for the calorie restricted:

Madrid, Spain, is a city of restaurants, every other building is a bar/restaurant, every time you order a beer they give you something to snack on. There are a billion places to stuff yourself like a glutton. I do not flatter myself to think, nor do I want to risk my health to find out, that these are truly the best places.

I wouldn’t survive a comprehensive survey of all the places to gorge in Madrid. These, however, are all delicious, with grand portions- places where you wear the pants with the elastic waistband and schedule time for a nap afterwards. I tried for a variety of cuisines as well, so when the urge to binge strikes you, you know you’ve got some good options.

1. Casa Mingo

It appears like a fortress, built of stone, a bulwark against hunger. The menu is barely larger than a credit card because they’ve decided they will just do a few things well. But you don’t even have to look at the menu, you know why you’re here – the best roast chicken in Madrid! Get a good group of friends together, or just make some new ones there, and prepare to let the grease drip down to your elbows in this beer-hall style setting. Important side dishes which are not to be missed are the chorizo in cider, and the cabrales cheese, all good northern Spanish fare, which of course just wouldn’t be right unless you washed it down with a few bottles of cider. Spanish cider comes in two styles: dulce – which is clear, sweet and bubbly, and (for the cool kids who wanna do things authentic-like) natural – which is cloudy and unsweetened (ask the waiters to pour it for you correctly – its an art).

Chickens – 9€ each
Sides – 4-6€

Paseo de la Florida, 34 (Metro – Príncipe Pío)

Nearest accommodation available on venere.com: Hotel Príncipe Pío Madrid

2. Arroceria Gala

The first Spanish dish I, and I’m sure many others, ever properly gorged myself on was classic paella. Any food for which the pan routinely has to be carried in by two people is not a dish for snacking. You can get a million paellas in Madrid but you won’t find many more enjoyable atmospheres than Arrocería Gala. The main dining room is a converted atrium, with a high cupola supported by cast iron columns, decorated with chandeliers and bordered by a virtual forest of plants. The front room, which you can’t miss from the street is entirely painted with murals of green country landscape dotted with black and white cows who gaze upon diners with bovine grace as they dive into the wide variety of paellas this arrocería provides for all your binging needs – seafood combos, chicken and chorizo (for those who aren’t so big on the seafood), vegetarian options, and black paella-died with the ink of the squid cooked into it. Paella is the specialty but this is an Arrocería so they have other types of rice dishes as well such as risottos.

13€ per person generally for rice dishes, but can go up to 25€ per person for the more elaborate seafood paellas.

Calle Moratín 22 (Metro: Antón Martín)

Nearest accommodation available on venere.com: Hotel Cervelo Madrid

3. Lavapiés Neighborhood

This dining option for the hungry is especially a favorite for the hungry and broke – and it isn’t one restaurant but a whole neighborhood – the Lavapiés curry district! A community of enterprising Bangladeshis has sprung up around the plaza and street of Lavapiés, a largely immigrant neighborhood, including groups from South America and Africa as well. And, as usually is the case is such neighborhoods, the food is great, varied, plentiful and cheap. Particularly impressive is the quantity of Indian restaurants the Bangladeshis have set up. These include a strip of 4 in a row on Calle Lavapiés, popular in the summer for their terraces (Baisakhi at No. 42 is an especially good value). On the parallel street, Calle del Ave Maria, Moharaj is a good feeding spot, as is Mr India, on the plaza itself. Bottom line is, competition keeps the prices down, and though the quality may not compare to certain neighborhoods in the UK, for Madrid, its a great place to go and eat until you’ve damaged your intestinal lining (if you’re into the vindaloo that is).

Starters – 2-4€
Entrees – 4-9€

Metro: Lavapies

Nearest accommodation available on venere.com: Abba Atocha Hotel Madrid

4. La Bola

This little bit of old Madrid is tucked away in the cute neighborhood around the Opera House. Half the fun of it is the old style decor – dark wood, lace curtains, it looks like a little old person’s living room, and its comfy like one too. The other half of the fun is the Cocido Madrileño - a traditional Madrid garbanzo stew in two courses. For the first course, the broth is extracted and poured over noodles for a steaming soup. Then you start in on the garbanzos, chorizo, tocino (yes just chunks of fat) and stewed meat. I recommend starving yourself for at least 12 hours if you want to make even a dent into the second course. It’s huge and covered in orange chorizo grease. It’ll set your workout progress back a couple of weeks easily. Wash it down with a couple of jugs of the house red and at the end undo the top button on your trousers and sip on a glass of hierbas or patxaran for a nice digestif, you’ll need it.

Menú Cocido Madrileño – 17€

Calle La Bola, 5 (Metro: Santo Domingo/ Opera)

Nearest accommodation available on venere.com: Hotel Sercotel Opera Madrid

5. Ribeira do Miño

If seafood is your bag, baby, then Madrid is your city, and Ribeira do Miño is your place to chow down. They’ve got all the Galician seafood classics – get your pulpo (that’s octopus) if you feel so inclined, and the pimientos de padrón (fried little green peppers, sometimes spicy) are a staple. Plan to do your eating outside of the normal, late, Spanish lunch and dinner hours (so, plan for about 1 for lunch, 8 for dinner) because this place is always packed to the rafters with hungry madrileños snapping off crab legs, crunching calamari and sucking down shellfish. If you’re really feeling like doing it big time, you go for the mariscada (mariscos is seafood)- a giant platter with, well, almost everything that swims, clings to rocks, snaps pincers and squirts ink. And to finish it off in grand dramatic style, you must have the quemada for your after dinner drink. It’s a bowl of very potent liquor with a twist of lemon and then set aflame! After a bit of the alcohol burns off they pour in a pot of coffee and ladle it out into cups. Not for the faint of stomach.

Mariscada – 25€ for 2 people, 50€ for 4.

Santa Brigida, 1 (Metro: Tribunal)

Nearest accommodation available on venere.com: Hostal Gallardo Madrid

Photo of Casa Mingo originally posted by deramaenrama

Topic:  Top five Monday | 1 Comment
Tags:  Madrid, restaurants

About the author

Karina came to Madrid from Berkeley, California to teach English for a year...that was four years ago! After finishing her degree in Political Theory (which prepared her perfectly for a career in...ummm....reading?) she had decided to improve her Spanish and see a bit of the world. Teaching English didn't pan out so she worked in a bar, then translated for sketchy businessmen, worked in a bookstore, and presented an online television news program before she decided to strike out on her own and try some freelancing (which she had the bad judgment to decide to do in the month of July, which meant she did very little writing and quite a lot of poolside lounging). She's lived all over this great city - the silver lining to the otherwise bleak storm cloud of having had 9 apartments in less than 4 years - and is now settled smack in the center. She's mainly interested in politics-specifically immigration policy and her country's recent foreign policy decisions. Other current activities and interests include: reading gut wrenchingly depressing novels, cooking for large groups of hungry people, occasionally writing on her blog, interning for CNN's Madrid bureau, learning a bit about video production, and improving her French.