Chronicle No. 67 · Places

Botín, 1725: The Oldest Restaurant in the World, Still Roasting

A French cook opened an inn below Madrid's Plaza Mayor three centuries ago. Hemingway gave it the last page of a novel.

In 1725 a French cook named Jean Botín and his Asturian wife opened an inn on Calle de Cuchilleros, in the tangle of streets below Madrid's Plaza Mayor. Three hundred years later the same address is still serving lunch, and Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest restaurant in the world.

The couple had no children, and the business passed to a nephew — a sobrino — which is how the place came to be called Sobrino de Botín.

What has not changed is the menu's centre of gravity:

• Cochinillo asado, suckling pig from the old wood-fired brick oven.
• Roast lamb, from the same oven.
• Rioja, still.

Its most valuable piece of marketing was written for nothing. Ernest Hemingway closed The Sun Also Rises with Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley at lunch here: We lunched up-stairs at Botin's. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Generations of readers have arrived with that sentence in their heads.

There is a twist worth knowing. The researcher Miguel Izu has argued that Hemingway more likely meant a different establishment, the Antigua Casa Botín in Plaza de Herradores.

Ownership passed in the 1930s to Amparo Martín and Emilio González, and the González family holds it still. Even the record has an asterisk: the doors closed during the COVID-19 shutdowns.

Three centuries, and what they guard hardest is one dish and one fire. Most restaurants fail from doing more, not less.

“We lunched up-stairs at Botin's. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta”

Lesson: Three centuries of trading came from protecting one dish and one oven; focus is a survival strategy, not a limitation.