If you badly want to travel to Mallorca, go to bed and have some sleep. This feeling won’t last.

But in our case, it did. So we just had to go there.

This is the same old story.

Each August my friend Nyusha and I together with our kids fly to Mallorca. I have to admit that our families don’t protest any longer. They understand that we need some time to relax and enjoy and it’s much more important for us than their “team building in an extreme situation”. So these seven days are only for us.

We arrived and found out that our favorite place at Louis’ had become bitchy and the owner had become spoiled under the pressure of tourist’s bucks. So we decided to look for something new.

Having made some inarticulate sound on Facebook, we were waiting for a response on part of the universe, and it gave us a gift — a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

The highway turned into a road. Then the road turned into a narrow street twisting among ancient houses and old garages with some dull girls in hills at the bus stop. Taking pity on the prostitutes at the roadside (we ingenuously took them for some highschool students — ouch what a life they have here in the sticks!), we reached a huge asphalted platform. It was 18:45 and there was no one around. Only at the exit we suddenly realized that this was the parking lot of a restaurant for 400 seats and that afterwards we’d have to look for our car for a really long time… So, can you see the difference between a nugget and a polished fake? It’s the absence of gloss but the presence of history and truth.

With regard to restaurants, I can feel it as well.

The moment we entered the place, the only decoration of which was some old tile, slabs of meat and black pig’s gammons hanging from the walls, we felt it.

The first complements, among which was the lightest as snow aioli cooked of crushed baked garlic and not of mayonnaise with garlic, made us understand everything. After the sourdough artisan bread, which came right from a hearth oven, the whole picture cleared up. The multi-volume wine card with the starting price of 9eur for a bottle made the clouds lift and looking at the neighboring tables we finally got it – this’s our home! We have no need to go anywhere else.

The special dish of the restaurant is the huge grape snails cooked with Iberian pig sauce. They serve it as an aperitif. I decided not to upset my friend who was eating them greedily and with whom I spent so much time lamenting over “our internal motherland”, which demands to renounce all kinds of the most delicious stuff such as pigs and rabbits.  Then they served mussels, just boiled, but large, fresh, dense and therefore enthusiastically accepted by us and children, with slices of Mallorca flower of salt and splatters of parsley sauce.

For the main course you should have meat and you’ll definitely be dying from delight with each piece and dish. None of us could stop eating those little human companions baked in the oven. In horror we realized that it was to end pretty soon, as the place in our stomachs was coming to its limits.

The sunset fantastically complemented our repast.

Having come down off this kind of narcotic gastro-trip, we looked around.

“Where did all these people come from?” Nyusha wondered.

The restaurant was buzzing like a beehive. Neither on the verandah, nor inside were there any free chairs. Tables were filled with food. There was a dump at the entrance. The hostesses were dying with notebooks in their hands and names of guests on their lips. Visitors stormed the bars, which weren’t responding. Children’s playground turned into a kindergarten in rush hour. And the parking lot was like a car dump in Tennessee, out of which there’s no way out. However, the skilled valet guys did get us out of this nightmare.

On the way back I was morose and silent. Among all the restaurant models available in Moscow there isn’t any one, which functions in this format. Phrases like “it’s fully booked” don’t produce any effect on people. In our Pushkin you’ll be seated on a first-come, first-served basis and you’ll definitely get in. Well, perhaps you’ll have to wait around 30 minutes, but then you’ll be seated. But fucking 400 seats – non-stop full!

I felt slight envy for the hard work of my colleagues, I remembered the Crianza that we hadn’t finished, and looked at the bus stop. The girls weren’t there. The stream of the intoxicated cars from the restaurant had washed them away and taken forward in search of adventure.