There is a category of hotel, mostly small, mostly rural, where the owners cook lunch. They do not always advertise this. You arrive on a weekday at one o'clock, sit down, and a plate appears. Nobody asks you what you would like. The answer is whatever is on.
We rate this kind of hotel highly. Not for sentimental reasons. For practical ones.
The first practical reason is that the food is better. An owner cooking for ten guests cooks differently from a chef cooking for ninety. There is less margin for boredom. There is no menu to defend, no covers to turn, no opening hours to maintain. The owner cooks what she went to buy that morning. If the market was thin she cooks something else. The food is the meal she would have served at home if she had not had guests.
The second practical reason is that it teaches you the place. An owner who cooks lunch knows the farmers, the fish market, the family who keep the goats up the hill. Lunch is a tour of the surrounding county in three courses. You finish it knowing where to go for cheese on the way home.
The third is that it changes the rhythm of the day. You are at the table at one. You finish at three. You then have nowhere to be. The hotel becomes a place to stay, not a place to leave each morning. The afternoon is for walking, sleeping, or sitting somewhere shaded with a book. The evening is light. By the third day you have forgotten what you came for.
The Casa de los Olivos lunch is the strongest example we know of this. Sofia, the owner, cooked in Madrid for twelve years before she and her husband bought the farmhouse. She does the daily lunch at one long table for the five rooms' guests. Last March we ate cold almond soup, sea bream baked in salt, strawberries with sherry vinegar. There was a dog under the table. There was no third option for the bread. The wine came from a vineyard twenty minutes away. The total time elapsed between sitting down and finishing the last glass was just over two hours.
A meal like that is not what people expect from a hotel. It is what they should.
We are looking for more of these. If you know of one, send it to us.