Restaurante Sebastián + Palma Street Art
Pigeons: descendants of dodos, with a calm coo and rough reputation. We’ve admired them from Central Park benches and let them land on our arms in Venice before grain sellers were banned from Piazza San Marco. But eat them we had not before visiting Mallorca’s northern coast. A feature of traditional local cooking—along with lamb, boar, and red prawns—pichón first landed on our plates at Restaurante Sebastián as carpaccio, its gaminess sugared by heart-red beets.
Deià is a tumble of ochre-colored alleys and rolling sea views nestled in the Serra de Tramuntana mountains. An idyllic town of rosemary and siroccos, goat paths winding through olive groves to rocky Balearic beaches, and cliffside roads too narrow for tour buses to stop. 8th-century Moorish rule established a savvy drainage system—still used—and gave the village its name, from “ad daia” or hamlet. Catholic missionaries followed; in recent years came poets and painters, cyclists and chefs.
Within a renovated stone stable, the restaurant peers over peaks of twilight green. Chef Sebastian Pasch and his wife Patricia have run this candlelit spot for 25 years. Each of Northern European roots, they respect this Spanish isle’s cuisine while exercising creative flair with its ingredients. Their seared foie with raspberries is caramelized and earthy, like warm slices of a salty jellied donut. If you order seconds, the chef will exit the kitchen to meet you. From admiration or morbid curiosity, we cannot say.
This vibrant meal may remind you of colorful sights from earlier that day. A 45-minute drive from Deià is Mallorca’s capital, Palma, a medieval metropolis with a cafe-strewn boardwalk dotted with yachts. Delve into the historic center and discover a thriving street art scene where facades have been tagged, stenciled, sprayed, and pasted since the 1990s. Peer around corners for the japes of SOMA or intimate portraits by Abraham Calero and Elma. Some artists mock the island’s influx of sock-and-sandaled tourists, although, like the pigeon, they seem both nuisance and delicacy: the street art tour business is booming.
6/28/2019