If there is a kitchen without a trap or cardboard, it is one that tells us, right from the start, what their pretensions are. It is precisely in this declaration of intentions, that of baptizing the restaurant as La Vaca y La Huerta (The Cow and the Garden), where Ángel and Fernando, responsible for the project, have carved a niche in the heart of Madrid Recoletos Street.
Based on these two principles and reinforced by respect for the raw material, they have developed a simple menu, which is committed to the product and is constantly renewed according to the season. Each approximately three months, with each change of season, a good number of dishes enter and leave the menu, depending on what the market can offer.
Here, in what is bought day by day, where the great bet of these two restoration experts from Madrid who started their gastronomic journey in 2003 with Le Café and which they replaced in 2014 with this concept of La Vaca and La Huerta. Under the new premise, what both wanted to recover was the sense of a traditional cuisine, simple, product and without great artifices. Something that, in the words of Fernando was “”based on the raw material, on purer concepts and clear with the client”. The approval of the latter seems to endorse their work: they have kept the customer who came to Le Café and have incorporated a new, younger client, but without giving up their usual clientele of the daily menu.
Merit of it is the menu that they present to us. Well differentiated and a good daily offer, very appropriate for the area of offices in which they are located, the restaurant offers us a kitchen in two aspects: the vegetables and the meats. First, more present in the starters, we recommend the tortilla de collejas, tastier than those with its namesake in the neck, the salad of burrata and chickweed or the cauliflower to the importance, tasty and vindictive with a vegetable that does not have too much attachment.
The adventure, depending on what the season dictates, can continue with the candied artichokes or vegetable stew, a forceful dish to temper the body. The vegetable selection is soon accompanied by the component of La Vaca, innovative to propose a menu in which the bovines are the only meats present on the menu, which, instead of limiting, multiplies their options.
From the gizzards flambéed, to the cheeks and letting ourselves be tempted by the meatballs of oxtail, heiresses of the traditional casserole, we can pass to the most classic cuts of the grill, such as the high loin, the pike of beef or the most carnivorous, the one-kilo t-bone. However, despite the devotion to meat, Fernando tells us that the restaurant is “not only for vegetarians, who also find their dishes here, but is open to all audiences.”
This same public is reached with the sweet version of the restaurant, where the flavor continues to reign in classic preparations such as the pears in wine or the cheese cake with mango and ginger honey; with a point of freshness that will make you not want to stop eating it.
Phone Number: 91 781 15 86
Average Price: Menu 22 euros; a la carte range from 30 to 35 euros
Hours: Monday through Thursday from 1:30 to 4 PM and from 9 to 11:30 PM; Friday and Saturdays from 1:30 to 4 PM and from 9 PM to 12 AM; Closed on Sundays
Text: Jaime de las Heras
Photographs: Nacho Alcalde Ruiz
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