Sobrino de Botín is a restaurant in Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain located on the ground floor of number 17, Calle de Cuchilleros, next to the Plaza Mayor.
It is related to the old Hostería Botín or Casa Botín, which appears in the Guinness World Records as the oldest in the world.
Pedro de Répide Gallegos places the original Hostería Española, founded in 1621, and later known as ‘Casa Botín’, in Plaza de Herradores, the same one that the writer Benito Pérez Galdós mentions in his novel Misericordia en Herradores and as an inn-inn.
For his part, Peter Besas assures that none of the travelers who visited Madrid in the 19th century, and who have subsequently documented their travels, mention “Botín”. Foreign authors of travel guides such as William Pitt Byrne (1866) speculate that the Botín de Herradores was a simple tavern. Finally, in 1922, in her Madrid, past and present, Beatrice Erskine Lane Suzuki differentiated the Casa Botín in the Plaza de Herradores from the Pastelería de nieto de Botín (also mentioned by Galdós as a pastry shop in Cuchilleros) as different establishments, “very modest, but picturesque”.
The building that houses the Sobrino de Botín restaurant has a brick façade with a classic 16th-century look and occupies four floors. The cuisine is traditional Castilian. It is listed as number three on the “Forbes list of essential restaurants”.
The restaurant and its speciality of cochinillo asado (roast suckling pig) are mentioned in the closing pages of Ernest Miller Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Its other signature dish is sopa de ajo (an egg poached in chicken broth, and laced with sherry and garlic), a favorite pick-me-up with madrileño revellers.
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