Sobrino de Botín

1 p.m.

The door opens at one

Sobrino de Botín opens every day at one in the afternoon, at Calle de Cuchilleros 17, about five minutes on foot from the middle of Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, and stays open until half past eleven at night. You come for one thing: what comes out of its wood oven. There are four floors and four dining rooms, and one oven for all of them. The house says it has kept the feel of an old inn across all four.

Book on the house’s site. The house says that when the online book shows nothing, a table can still be had at 1 p.m. or at 11:15 p.m., any day except on exceptional dates. Take the one o’clock if you can: you will have the start of the afternoon.

Do not use the contact form to book; the house says it is not for reservations. The phone numbers are +34 91 366 42 17 and +34 91 366 30 26.

The oven

Holm oak, since 1725

The oven has been in use since the house opened, in 1725, and it burns holm-oak wood. Master roasters watch over it, and the embers are banked to the left of the hearth, the house says. In 2025 the house turned 300, and the oven with it.

The suckling pigs are Segovian, and they and the lambs come in from the triangle of Sepúlveda, Aranda and Riaza three and four times a week, the house says. The seasoning is short: salt, pepper, water, lard, white wine, bay leaf, onion and garlic.

Order the cochinillo asado. The roast lamb comes from the same oven. Before it, the sopa castellana, the garlic soup of Castile, or the almejas Botín, the house clams. If someone at the table will not eat pig or lamb, the menu also has merluza de pincho, line-caught hake, and fresh sole, and there is gazpacho.

The oven at Botín was lit in 1725, and the house has kept it going ever since.

Upstairs

The room at the end of the novel

Ask for the dining room upstairs. Hemingway was a friend of Emilio González, father and grandfather of the family that runs Botín today, and he ended The Sun Also Rises in this house. “We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s,” the last chapter runs, and the lunch is roast young suckling pig, with rioja alta. The house says American visitors still come looking for that room.

He came back to Botín in Death in the Afternoon, in 1932. Other writers set scenes here too. Galdós sent his characters to dine at the pastry counter of the Sobrino de Botín in Fortunata y Jacinta, in 1886. Graham Greene put it in Monsignor Quixote, in 1982, and James Michener in Iberia.

Order what the narrator ordered.

The entrance room

Table 203

Downstairs has its regulars too. In the dining room by the entrance, the house remembers a table by its number. The poets José Bergamín and Rafael Alberti always lunched at table 203. If upstairs is full, ask for the entrance room, and for that table.

The building is older than the restaurant: the house finds it in the records from 1590, on a street named for the cutlers who worked on it. A French cook, Jean Botín, and his Asturian wife were already working nearby when her nephew, Cándido Remis, opened a small inn here in 1725. Spanish inns of the time could not sell meat or wine; travelers ate what they brought. The ground floor got its gold-leaf wooden frieze and a pastry counter in the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century Amparo Martín and Emilio González took the house on with seven employees, and their sons, Antonio and José, made it larger. Through the Civil War, Emilio kept it open as a dining room for militiamen. In 1987 Guinness named Botín the oldest restaurant in the world. The same edition told of a teenage Goya washing dishes here in 1765. The house calls that a legend, and so do we.

11:15 p.m.

The late table

The other hour the house names is 11:15 p.m., a quarter of an hour before it closes. Book it the same way, online, and take it if the afternoon is gone.

Since 1959, the house says, the tuna, a band of student musicians, has been part of Botín: five students began singing here that year. Whether they come tonight, the house does not say. If they do, stay for one song.