Styles

Five of a kind

While all the family run restaurants on our website and in our guides are well worth visiting, we obviously don’t expect them to be exactly the same. Restaurants, like people, come in different shapes and sizes. The rules are simple. They should all use local and seasonal produce, the sole exception being imported spices.

How to spot a real family run restaurant

You might think the phrase ‘family run restaurant’ is self-explanatory, but no. To qualify for our guide, a family run restaurant must have only one restaurant with at least two family members working on the premises; and at least 70% of the food served needs to be local, seasonal, and with a commitment to using organic food wherever possible. For quite a while now, many restaurant reservation sites have been criticised for their ‘review’ sections, given that these are often mendacious, manipulative, inaccurate, or written, unashamedly, by the restaurants themselves. How to avoid such perfidy and skulduggery? At FRR we insist that recommendations come either from the owners of other family run restaurants or from established regular customers. This results in recommendations that are credible rather than crafty and helps to mark out family run restaurants as a special –and trustworthy– category in their own right, which is exactly what they are.

We visit each and every one

Once we have received at least two recommendations from existing restaurant members our inspectors visit them to guarantee that, among other things, they’re committed to the use of organic produce wherever possible, with a view to upping the percentage of seasonal and local produce from the currently required 70% to 95% by 2025.

All our restaurants serve local and seasonal products and are commited to organic wherever possible.

- Rustic -

In other words, simple, unfussy and low-priced cuisine served in a friendly, homely atmosphere.

- Classic traditional -

This is what in Catalan they call ‘la cuina de l’àvia’ (‘grandmother’s cooking’): great local dishes that have been served for at least half a dozen generations and have not been fiddled with in any way whatsoever.

- Modern traditional -

Increasingly popular, this is traditional cooking to which the chef has added a few twists and turns of his or her own to bring out the best in it, not to mention making it more contemporary.

- Creative -

Cuisine which employs new combinations of foods and different methods of cooking using local produce and inspired by recipes from all over the world, in order to make something as surprising as it is delicious.

- Master -

Those restaurants whose food is so spellbindingly brilliant it makes customers feel their taste buds have been treated better than royalty. The chefs in these restaurants are at the very top of their game, hence our reverential qualification of them as ‘Masters’.