Asturias: Three Tables, One Valley
One family, a restaurant in the childhood home, a hotel in the palace next door — and a young chef showing at five tables in a mountain village that Asturias is enough.
You don't go to Asturias for the weather. It rains, often, and the mountains stand so close to the coast that the clouds get caught. You go because a cuisine has emerged here that has made something out of beans, cheese and cider you can't get in Paris or Copenhagen — and because three addresses in a single valley are enough to understand it.
The first is a house you won't find on any map.
Casa Marcial: the family home
La Salgar is a hamlet above Arriondas, a few houses on a road that ends in the woods. One of them was the Manzano family's village tavern. In 1993 Nacho Manzano and his sisters turned it into a restaurant without leaving the house. It's still the same building today: stone walls, small windows, a dining room that seats twenty.
What has changed is what arrives on the plate. Manzano cooks Asturian — fabada, seafood from the coast thirty minutes away, cheese from the caves of the Picos — and he cooks it so that Michelin gives it three stars. The trick is that there is no trick. The cooking hasn't risen above its origins; it has gone deeper into them.
You eat here for one evening and afterwards understand the whole region.
Narbasu: the nights before and after
Casa Marcial has no rooms. That was a decision: the restaurant should remain a restaurant. The answer to where you sleep the family built twenty minutes away, in the Palacio de Rubianes at Cereceda — a country house in the valley below the Sueve massif, looking towards the Picos de Europa.
Narbasu is a hotel of 23 rooms and a restaurant that holds a Green Star because the vegetables come from its own garden and the rest from farms within sight. It's the quieter of the two houses: you arrive, go into the garden, eat, sleep, and the next morning the mountains are there.
The combination is the concept: Marcial for the evening, Narbasu for everything else.
Monte: five tables in San Feliz
An hour west, in the mountain village of San Feliz in the municipality of Lena, Xune Andrade opened a restaurant in 2019 that is a kilometre from the motorway and nonetheless at the end of the world. Five tables. Charcoal, ferments, produce from the mountains. A Michelin star and a Green Star before he turned forty.
Monte is the next generation of the cooking Manzano began: more reduced still, more local still, with a wine list Delia Melgarejo has assembled from small growers and mountain wines. You sit in a room as plain as the village and are served a menu that does the village justice.
Do all three addresses on three evenings and you haven't travelled Asturias. But you've understood it.
Practical
Arrive via Oviedo (Asturias airport, 45 minutes) or Bilbao (3 hours). A hire car is essential. Book Casa Marcial weeks ahead; Monte likewise. Best time: June and September — in August the coast is full, in winter the passes are closed.
