C’as Patro March
“If you can stand, Mallorca’s a heaven.” Jazz-age novelist Gertrude Stein may have talked about C’as Patro March, the Mallorcan seafood hut of decade-old driftwood and slender shade, hung limpet-like on the rock and framed by impossibly blue seas. It might very well be the most beautiful restaurant in the world. Led by the same family for decades, it is tranquil, leisurely and sustainable.
Patro Cas March is accessible by sea or by a steep, tightly shifting road from Deià that is fragrant with the rich adhesiveness of ripe figs and cacti sap. A rocky, bone-dry and unclean riverbed falls like a wound from the cliff. The whispering cicadas sound is overwhelming. It is unedited, most authentic in Mallorca. Despite its appeal with the brilliant set, Deià still feels like a beautiful secret, a coloured candy village hanging unlikely on a mountainside. Little tumbles of steps in ravines disappear, yet grandmothers still swim their doorways with twiggy brooms. The grocery in the village sells packs and strings of paper onions and teenage bottles of whiskey. Everything looks provincial.
“I love Mallorca, for the fruit of my garden, the odour of the wood of olives, the sun between the rocks of Es Teix, the sound of the sheep at night.”