If you want to eat like a local in L'Escala, head to the nucli antic — the old fishing village at the heart of the town. Away from the tourist seafront, the narrow streets here are where you'll find the restaurants that the locals actually go to. El Gotim is one of the best.

The Daily Menu

Like many good Catalan restaurants, El Gotim offers a menú del dia — a fixed-price lunch menu that changes daily. At €20 per person, it's outstanding value. You get a starter, main course, dessert, and a drink. The portions are generous, the ingredients are fresh, and the cooking is rooted in Catalan tradition.

On our visit, the starters included a mango salad with almonds — a light, refreshing opener — and stuffed Piquillo peppers, which were rich and savoury with a perfect balance of sweetness from the peppers and depth from the filling.

Main Courses

The main course options showcased the range of the kitchen. The beef stew in ratafia sauce was the standout — slow-braised until meltingly tender, with the distinctive herbal sweetness of ratafia (a traditional Catalan liqueur made with green walnuts and herbs) adding a unique depth to the sauce. It's a dish that tastes like it's been simmering all morning, which it probably has.

Other mains included an El Gotim-style rice — their house take on an arrosejat — and spinach cannelloni, a Catalan classic that's especially popular around Christmas but appears year-round on menus across the region.

Dessert

Dessert was a homemade pastís de formatge (cheesecake), creamy and light with a biscuit base. The perfect end to a meal that left us full, happy, and about €50 lighter for two people. That's hard to argue with.

El Gotim is the kind of place you come back to every time you're in L'Escala. Unpretentious, consistently good, and reasonably priced. The nucli antic has several restaurants worth trying, but this is the one we keep returning to.