Cenador de Amós - Villaverde de Pontones
Main dining room
Rating: 17/20
Where: Villaverde de Pontones, Spain
When: Lunch for 4 on 18 May 2022
Cost: Tasting menu 227 Euro, Wine Pairing 125 Euro
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars
Why: Great wine pairing, playful cuisine, some excellent dishes
Cenador de Amós is located in the tiny village of Villaverde de Pontones, a short drive away from the city Santander in northern Spain. Or, as in our case, a two-hour-each-way roundtrip from San Sebastian. In a competition with Fontjoncuse for the smallest town to have a three-star Michelin restaurant, it falls short with slightly over 300 inhabitants.
Housed in an old palace, the dining room has been renovated to be thoroughly modern, with some nods to the original architecture. Only the bathrooms seem to have entirely escaped the attention of the interior designer.
Our meal started out in a newly built lounge adjacent to the main building. The first pair of appetizers were a glass of strawberry flavored vermouth and a strawberry filled with vermouth. A playful combination. The drink was very nice, but the strawberry was a bit too bitter for my taste 17.
Next came a cracker filled with slices of white asparagus, mayonnaise and salmon roe. This had a really nice combination of textures - creamy and crunchy -, but the asparagus again felt a bit too bitter 18. My wife disagreed completely and thought this was a 20.
The following "pairing" was a beer served with a Spanish omelet in the shape of a cone. The crunchy cone contained eggs, potatoes and caramelized onion, the latter providing much of the flavor. The cones were served on top of lovely potato chips that looked like decoration, but were eminently edible 17.
The final amuse bouche was a cuttlefish served over crunchy seaweed filled with uni. Most everything in this dish was colored black with cuttlefish ink. It had to be eaten in one bite, and was described as an "explosion of the sea". The cuttlefish was very good indeed, the crunch from the seaweed also nice, but the overall dish again a bit bitter and not really to my taste 17.
Menu choices were limited. There were two tasting menus, but one had to be chosen when making the reservation, so on arrival the menu was fixed, but preferences such as pescatarian, or "no oysters" were readily accommodated. The main course, pigeon, could be replaced by beef or fish. I'm not the biggest fan of pigeon, in fact it would be my last choice among those three options, but I figured I'd give the tasting menu a try as originally envisioned. (Luckily, my dining companions chose the other two dishes, so I got to try all three.)
There were two wine pairing options, a regular and a premium one. Our request to order one of each was rebuffed, since that would be "too complicated for the staff". Huh? You'd figure that at the three-star level, a restaurant should be able to figure out how to pour two different wines per course. But the sommelier was adamant, so instead of ordering two different pairings, we just got a single, regular pairing. Wouldn't a restaurant rather have the extra profit of a premium pairing even if it required a bit more work from the servers? Not in this case, apparently.
On the positive side, the wine pairing was actually pretty good, and contained some excellent wines - for 125 Euros it could be considered a fair deal. Wine pairings in Spain in general seem to be priced more sensibly than in the rest of the world.
Anyway, on to the food. Our first course was a cured anchovy rolled up in butter, served on a stick with a brioche bread on the side. The anchovy was extremely rich, it was almost like eating a piece of butter. This was definitely a dish that needed to be eaten together with the bread. Combined like that, a very good anchovy flavor came to the foreground, and the result was pretty enjoyable 17.
We were served two kinds of bread, one white and one more hearty, probably sourdough. They were of decent quality, and went marvelously with the provided olive oil and anchovy salt. The two butters, one plain and one with anchovies, were a bit more mundane 17.
A brochette of mackerel and artichoke was served with anchovy butter and caviar. The artichoke was pickled perfectly (a 20 if rated by itself), but the mackerel was somewhat chewy, and the butter again made this way too heavy a dish 17.
Next, a marinated Normandy oyster with a carrot apricot sauce. A one-word description of this might be "different", not a combination one sees often. The slightly sweet sauce overpowered the oyster flavor. I liked the result, but this is a hard dish to judge objectively 18.
Hake served with a pil pil sauce and teardrop peas was a very nicely cooked fish. The (quite expensive) peas added a good texture and a bit of sweetness. The creamy sauce however was pretty heavy and a bit too much for the dish, but maybe that's by design as we saw right afterwards 18.
Once we finished the hake, a pea soup was poured into the bowl to mix with the remainder of the pil pil sauce. This resulted in a wonderful soup bursting with pea flavor, truly excellent 19.
"Spring mushrooms" was the next dish: cooked and raw mushrooms in a foamy sauce. The mushrooms were lovely, but disappeared into the sauce that was (a) too heavy and (b) served in way too large a quantity. It dish was a chore to finish due to its heaviness 16.
Langoustine was served in a langoustine sauce with a side of "gnocchi" made from langoustine heads. The langoustine was nicely cooked, and the sauce very flavorful. The gnocchi however had an odd texture - barely solid and closer to raw, liquidy dough -, they didn't have much flavor either, and could have been served warmer than merely lukewarm (no more than 15 for the gnocchi). Overall 17.
Black monkfish came with fried spinach and a finely diced baked potato. The fish was perfectly cooked, the spinach a bit weak in flavor, the sauce ok, maybe a 17 overall. The pescatarian version was served with a green herb sauce instead. That sauce was truly spectacular, making this easily the best dish of the entire meal 19.
The main course was pigeon served in three parts. First, a dramatically plated "pigeon heart" with splatters of "blood" across the plate. In reality, this was a foie gras pate shaped like a heart served with a red beet sauce. The dish was way too sweet, mostly thanks to the beet juice. The liver was, as my notes say, "meh". Overall a quite mediocre dish, but the paired wine, a 2019 Clio, was excellent 14.
Part two of the pigeon was its breast. The breast was a bit gamey, with a heavy, sweet sauce. I'm not a big fan of gamey meats, so this is not the dish for me, but generously 16.
The pigeon alternatives were much better. Beef with a beet sauce was excellent 18, as was a fish in a herb sauce 18. It's unclear to me why the kitchen would choose the worst of all three main course options to be the default choice on the tasting menu.
The third part of the "pigeon" was duck liver encased in a deep fried dough ball. Fine, but anticlimactic 16.
Transitioning to desserts, we were served a whiskey sour cocktail with flower-infused water (this water had been the center piece of the table for the past hour or so), and also mango, apricot and rosemary water. I loved this drink, it was both a palate cleanser and a good cocktail in its own right 19.
A rice pudding wrapped in mochi paper was next. It was a very doughy dessert and tasted mostly of cinnamon - overall not that exciting 16.
Next up, a triple of desserts served together. Cocoa fruit ice cream in banana water was a mixed bag. I loved the ice cream, but the banana water was an odd accompaniment - banana is a tough customer to include in a dessert without overpowering it, as happened here 15.
A frozen "snow" of white chocolate ice cream, served over passion fruit puree was more successful, I wish I'd eaten this dessert first, since the ice cream froze the passion fruit puree, and they might have mixed better while still liquid. But otherwise, a nice combination of creamy, sweet and acidic (the latter from the passion fruit) 18.
A chocolate cake with chocolate emulsion was a very eggy cake akin to a lava cake, but served cold. Less egg and serving this warm might have been a better choice 16.
Petit fours concluded the meal. Five choices were served directly, and more could be selected from a cart. Oddly, whenever we indicated interest in an item on the cart, we got servings for everyone at the table and not just for the person asking. Needless to say, there were lots of leftovers at the end.
A sweet lemon wedge with cardamom was sweet and sour, a wonderful combination 18. A coconut praline tasted of very little 14. An almond puff pastry had a nice crunch 17. A jellied egg yolk candy tasted intensely of sweetened egg yolk - not exactly my thing, I like my egg yolk mixed with other things 13.
From the cart, we selected a chocolate coin filled with nougat 15, a piece of milk chocolate 15, chocolate with almonds 18, a (very soft) toffee bonbon with an edible wrapper 16, ruby chocolate 17, and a cookie topped with a big slab of butter - probably the return of whoever created the anchovy with butter earlier in the menu -, the cookie was good, but almost inedible with the butter 12.
Service throughout our lunch was mixed at best. Apart from the refusal to serve us two different wine pairings, empty wine glasses were rarely removed from the table, my collection reached four or five empty glasses before the sommelier took any of them away. And it's not like the staff was too busy - we saw them idling and looking at our table, but taking no action. New courses were announced with a loud "excuse me", trampling over any conversation going on at the time - other restaurants manage this more gracefully.
Overall: Our lunch felt a bit lackluster. The service was mediocre, and the cooking for the most part fell well short of a three-star level. Bizarrely, most of the high points of the meal did not appear on the regular tasting menu at all, but were the pescatarian or other replacements. Based on those dishes, the kitchen is clearly able to cook at a three-star level, so it's a mystery why they choose to serve inferior dishes to most customers 17.
Tasting menu
PS: Running along the boardwalk in San Sebastian can be daunting in the summer due to all the pedestrians. But in May it was a perfect post-lunch exercise with wonderful views.