Roasted over oak and olive woodLakshmi Aguirre Iglesias
The Indian restaurant that coexists on the same block with another kebab restaurant and one with
Tex-Mex
cuisine begins to perfume the air. Several groups of men share rooms at the Kiosko de la Loma, the most sought-after corner of the San Julián neighborhood. Someone has crocheted colorful blankets and covered the tree trunks with them. The children say that this way they don't get cold, although that is relative in Malaga. The 'kill houses' follow one after another just as on the access roads, between junctions of roundabouts, cars are linked. They look to park in the shopping centers that coexist with the neighbors and that explode during the weekends or in the warehouses intended to provide parking service to the airport, which is located very close to here. Nothing stops in this strange, multifaceted neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, not even in the Mesón El Pollo del Tío Paco.
Even the chickens move, turning impassively in front of the fire skewered on swords. No butane gas, here the flames are lit by oak and olive wood that has been strategically placed in each of the grill's woodsheds. The pieces brown like vacationers in the sun and release juices that fall into the trays, which are filled drop by drop with the patience of a saint. They do not smear them in lard, something that is usually common in Andalusia.
They will later use that nectar to make the legendary and secret sauce of the inn in which almost a dozen vegetables, three types of wine, and different spices are combined. It is a much milder sauce than usual, but it makes the chicken—you can order half (10.40 euros) or quarters (6.60 euros), always juicy—come alive on the plate. “There are many customers who ask for one more bowl; I have even seen women spread croquettes on it,” says Inma García, heiress of the house after the disappearance of her father, the famous Paco who named it after her.
A very juicy quarter of chickenLakshmi Aguirre Iglesias
The façade of the inn is that of an Andalusian farmhouse, white, with its characteristic wooden gate that keeps opening and closing to make way for the clients, who are affluent. Outside, several people are queuing in front of a window from which a pair of hands hands out bags that hold the same heat that is cooked inside. The heart of the restaurant is the closed patio surrounded by arches in which chattering tables are spread out, around which more and more seats are distributed, all occupied. A dozen athletic waiters weave between them with plates floating from their wrists to their shoulders. The kitchen, open, runs at a trot. Only the antiques – pots, kitchen and farming tools, saucers and still lifes – and the stuffed partridges remain still, and silent, in this house.
If we go to chickens…
Francisco García was born in Ardales and traveled to Catalonia to make a living. The town in Malaga is twinned with Blanes (Girona) and there were many inhabitants of the area who in the sixties took their backpack and ended up working there or in Calella, Sant Pol, Lloret de Mar. In this last town on the Costa Brava it is where Paco ended up settling and lived there for 30 years, while on another coast, that of the Sol, his wife, Francisca Fuentes, raised their children: “I was neither widowed, nor single, nor married,” the woman usually says. . “We only saw him in the summer, when we spent our holidays there, or in the low season, when he returned to work on the construction site and left again,” says Inma.
The restaurant of the legendary El Relicario hotel was the square in which he fought. Under the central patio - which is irremediably reminiscent of the one that Paco later built in Malaga and where flamenco shows filled every night - was the
al'ast
chicken rotisserie and the grills that the man from Malaga learned to handle with ease. Three decades go a long way and, according to his nephews José and Rafael Vallejo, who today keep the inn's kitchen boiling, he only had to place a piece of meat on the palm of his hand to know how long and how much temperature it would need to cook. as it should. They have inherited the point.
The Méson patio in full effervescenceLakshmi Aguirre Iglesias
They can serve up to 900 chickens per week: here, as in the joke, if we go to chickens we go to chickens. The truth is, however, that you can give them good company because in this restaurant there is much more cuisine. Pork chops (12 euros), lamb shoulders (19.50 euros), beef tenderloins (23.50 euros), feathers, prey and secrets (17 euros) and even a whole suckling pig if you order them pass over the embers. charge. The casseroles also bear fruit: the oxtail (17.20 euros) served with stewed vegetables and baked potatoes is worth a try. The smoothness of the chicken sauce rubs off on this dish, something that is surprising in such a traditional house. They serve cheeks, snails with rabbit and even an Extremaduran stew in generous portions and at a good price (16 euros).
No one can start without some pan-fried Ardales sausages (3.50 euros) and the catheto bread from the century-old Cordero bakery with a good splash of olive oil on top that is served as soon as you sit down. The aforementioned croquettes (8.50 euros per portion) cost hundreds. In fact, they were one of the restaurant's biggest draws when they opened in Loma de San Julián—first in a restaurant that they took over in 1990, then in this one that Paco built from scratch in 2005—that place that, literally, , before it was all field. “The croquettes helped us attract more people. There was nothing here: only five or six people came to eat. My father started making them with leftover chickens, but today is the day we have to roast more chickens to be able to serve all the ones they ask for.” They are all meat, a croquette worthy of use.
The choricitos from ArdalesLakshmi Aguirre Iglesias
A stop in time
A table of sixteen celebrates Grandpa's birthday. Inma and her husband, José Antonio Sancho, leader of the dining room, have witnessed how the members of each family of clients have multiplied over the years. The girls who previously sneaked into the restaurant kitchen now try to prevent their daughters from doing so. An octogenarian woman who hunted for fries with her fingers between sips of beer now hugs the container with the leftovers that she will take home. Couples of friends, solitary couples, indoor Sunday guests enliven the volume of the dining room.
Several tables are occupied by foreigners. Some, still pale, carry suitcases; Others, already tanned like chickens, ask about the homemade desserts and the Catalan cream that Paco brought in his pocket from Girona. Many have homes in the coastal neighborhood of Guadalmar which is on the other side of the highway or in nearby Torremolinos. “When they lend the house to their friends, they leave them a note with recommendations, a go here or there. I know it because they tell me so. It's all by word of mouth. It is still the best advertising,” Inma comments proudly.
The famous and popular croquettesLakshmi Aguirre Iglesias
Don't miss the menu
During the week they add to their menu the daily menu (9.70 euros), which is usually made up of meat, of course, and soups, stews and stews that come from the recipes of the women of the family: gazpachuelos, cabbages, chickpeas with white beans and chorizo, potato casseroles… “There is José turning the pot with the ladle for hours,” Inma highlights, “he doesn't even want to hear about the Thermomix.” Absolutely everything is made at home: “Today they sell you everything ready-made, you heat it in the microwave and that's it. “So anyone has a business,” she protests. The dishes of the day are distributed among the neighbors, the workers who stop and post in the area, the retired couples from Córdoba and Jaén who get oxygen on the beach, the neighbors and those who take advantage of shopping at Leroy Merlin and Decathlon to feel, maybe a little safer.
There may be something that stops at Mesón El Pollo del Tío Paco, and it is time. It remains just as Paco García devised it, being 1000 km from his house. She dreamed of him for 30 years, returned to his wife and managed to raise him up just the way she wanted. This restaurant, the one he imagined and built from scratch, was inaugurated on December 1, 2005. He died three weeks later. However, everything is Paco in this wood-fired grill, one of the few that remains intact in the province and where the homemade food earns its name. Here you know that you are in Malaga: if you have any questions, just ask about the location of the bathroom. The answer is blunt: “Stir it up.”
Mesón El Pollo de Tío Paco: c/London, 6, Churriana, Málaga. Tel. 952 236 127. Map.
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