Restaurante Silogía is a modern Canarian restaurant in Garachico, about ten minutes by car from San Marcos. It is the place we send guests who want a proper dinner rather than a plate of grilled fish, and the one we send vegetarians to without hesitating.
Why vegetarians should note this one
Canarian cooking is generous but not naturally vegetarian. The default menu of a north-coast restaurant is fish, rabbit, goat and pork, with vegetables in a supporting role. After three or four days that becomes a real constraint if you do not eat meat.
Silogía is the exception our hosts single out, and it is the reason this restaurant is worth a short drive rather than settling for whatever is open in the village. Vegetables are treated as the point of the dish rather than the garnish — which, in a place where papas arrugadas and mojo are already a national dish, is less of a stretch than it sounds.
Ask for the local wine
The host note is specific about this, and it is good advice: ask for Viña Zanata, a white made in La Guancha, a few kilometres along the coast.
Tenerife’s wine is one of the island’s genuine oddities. The vines here were never wiped out by the phylloxera louse that destroyed most of Europe’s vineyards in the nineteenth century, so many are still growing on their own ungrafted rootstock, in volcanic soil, at altitude. Very little of it is exported. Drinking it here is more or less the only convenient way to drink it at all.
Eating in a town that was buried
Garachico is worth understanding before you eat in it. It was founded in 1496 and its natural harbour made it the most important port in the Canary Islands through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shipping malvasía wine to Europe and the Americas.
In May 1706 the Trevejo volcano erupted about eight kilometres above the town. Seven lava flows came down the hillside over the following days and filled the harbour completely. The port never came back, and the town’s commercial life ended with it.
What is left is a small, unusually intact old town that has been quiet for three hundred years, built around the shape the lava left behind. The restaurants sit on top of that.
Getting there
Ten minutes by car from the apartment along the coast road. Garachico is popular and the centre gets busy, so park where you can on the way in rather than circling.
Check current opening hours before you set off — this coast keeps hours that catch visitors out, and Garachico’s restaurants are no exception.