Tasca Restaurante Los Pinos is a small traditional restaurant in Garachico, ten minutes along the coast from San Marcos. It cooks plain Canarian food in a cosy room, and the single most useful thing to know is that it is a lunch place: the kitchen tends to close early.
Treat it as a lunch plan
Most of the advice in this guide about opening hours is general. This one is specific, and it comes straight from our hosts: Los Pinos closes early, so build it into the middle of the day rather than the end of it.
That is not a limitation so much as a fit. Lunch is the main meal on this coast — the long, several-course, unhurried one — and a traditional tasca is exactly the room to eat it in. Coming here at lunchtime is doing it the way it is meant to be done.
What you will actually be eating
Canarian tasca food is straightforward and very good when it is fresh. Expect fish, often small ones fried whole and eaten more or less entire; papas arrugadas, small potatoes boiled in heavily salted water until the skins wrinkle and crust; and mojo in both versions, the red one made with peppers and the green one with coriander, which goes with almost everything.
There will probably be rabbit, and there may be goat. Portions are built for a table rather than a person.
Where you are eating it
Garachico was the principal port of the Canary Islands until May 1706, when the Trevejo volcano erupted above the town and seven lava flows buried the harbour over the following days. The town lost its trade and never really regained it, which is why the old centre is so unusually intact: nothing has had the money to knock it down.
Lunch in a small tasca is one of the better ways to spend an hour in a town like that.
Getting there
Ten minutes by car from the apartment. As always here, check whether the door is open before you set off — this is precisely the kind of restaurant that keeps its own hours.