Wined, dined and rested.

I’ve written about Istán before; it’s a little ‘white village’ up the valley from Marbella. If you want a supermarket, or a very smart restaurant, or anything not preceded by the word “small”, you have to drive down to Marbella and its satellite urbanisations.

However this year we’ve discovered a place to eat really very good food, well thought-out and executed, in the most unlikely of venues. (Actually we’ve discovered two unusual venues for excellent food this year, the other one is in France and is in a separate post.)

Let me take you on a little detour first, by way of comparison. If you have taken your children to swimming lessons at the local pool in the UK you will be familiar with the smell of chlorine and the echoing sounds of children enjoying and not enjoying their swimming lessons. You will also remember the café. unpleasant cups of watery coffee or tea, and maybe you’ve had to feed one child on crisps or doughnuts, the usual food available, to keep them occupied as the other child has their lesson. So for me anyway, the smell of food at swimming pools goes crisps – chlorine – hot water masquerading as tea.

Back to Istán now. Some years ago the town hall had a municipal swimming pool built; it’s near the top of a small mountain on the edge of town and it’s beautiful. It’s modern, shiny, fantastically clean, it has a toddlers’ pool and as well as the main one, and it must have the best views of any pool anywhere.

This year when I went to swim there for the first time I discovered that they had also built a “café” next to it where previously there had been a small snack bar offering just basic keep-the-kids-happy snacks.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Where to start? Again, the best views of any eating place for miles around – mountains everywhere you look, up to the Sierra Nevada and heading down to the Mediterranean. Little picturesque Istán scattered down the hillside below.

The café has been beautifully designed with picture windows that in summer are opened fully so you catch the gentle (and much appreciated) mountain breeze. The building is circular with the bar and serving area in the middle so that all tables have views out and the radiating wooden beams above lead your eyes out time and time again to the hills and the valleys beyond.

OK, so it looks beautiful. And it’s a lovely shady, airy place to sit in a scorchingly hot Andalucian summer’s day when it’s 36 or 37 degrees outside.

So now I’m going to tell you about the food. Frankly, it’s such a lovely place to be you might forgive some ordinary food, after all it is only a “café”. And a swimming pool café at that.

But no, they have a young local chef – a chef? In a swimming pool café? What alternative universe have I fallen into? – who is clearly being allowed to stretch his wings and experiment. The perfect example of this is the prawns pil-pil. This dish is omnipresent in Spain; pretty much every eatery offers it and there are good versions as well as – mostly – bad versions in which the poor little prawns have been turned into rubbery bullets but, well, garlic butter’s always nice and you can at least dip your bread in that…..

Here at Raices – yes, the swimming pool café has a name, meaning “roots” – prawns pil-pil has grown up and become serious food. Yes you get the terracotta dish with the prawns in the sizzling garlic butter but it is served with a plate on top of it with the fried prawns’ heads arranged around some aioli…..

Frying the heads makes them all just crunchy, there are no sharp or stringy pieces, and dipped in the aioli they are delicious. There’s also a tuna tartare that’s very nicely done….

And the croquetas, in the picture earlier, are definitely homemade and are delicious – every day they are a different flavour, these were (intensely) jamón-flavoured.

There are even a few puddings on this delightfully restricted menu – again, the chef has chosen typical dishes and developed them. So yes, there is “flan” (= caramel custard) but here it’s flavoured with chestnut, and yes there is “arroz con leche” ( = rice pudding) but here it is made with goats’ cheese! I tried the “helado frito” (= fried ice cream) because, well, why wouldn’t you?

The ‘fried’ part is, I think, a rolled-out piece of bread, wrapped round a scoop of vanilla ice cream and flash fried; it is nice, the contrasts are excellent, but as a dish it needs a little more oomph than vanilla ice cream can give it, in my opinion. But how exciting to see this young chef experimenting.

There is a small but carefully considered wine list as well as local beer and the usual soft drinks. Oh and you are given a jug of water immediately; so often in Spanish restaurants you are told you have to buy bottled water, with a whole range of excuses for this – “the water’s not good for drinking” (so what do you wash the food in?), “we don’t have any jugs” (you’re  a restaurant and you have nothing to put water in?????), “the dog’s drunk all the tap water” (OK, I made that one up but it’s about as likely as any of the others).

The service is excellent, the lady who runs front of house is super efficient and friendly – she has her eye on everything, never loses her cool and her leadership sets the tone for everything else.

Oh and the prices are very reasonable.

So if you find yourself on the Costa del Sol and have had enough of expensive “international” cuisine, head for the hills! You won’t regret it.