Tenerife eats like two different islands, and the dividing line is the mountain in the middle. The south is dry, sunny and built for visitors, and its food is coastal: grilled fish, papas arrugadas, plenty of competent international cooking. The north is green, wet, farmed and far less interested in you, and that is where the island's own kitchen lives — wine country, rough tables, goat, potatoes with names, and stews that take four hours.
You can eat well in both. But the single most useful thing to know before you order anything on Tenerife is that a forty-minute drive north over the ridge changes the menu completely, and it changes the price by roughly a third in your favour.
What follows is what to order, region by region, plus the couple of local habits — the guachinche, the papa antigua, the escaldón — that separate a good Tenerife food trip from a fine one.
Start with the guachinche
A guachinche is a wine-grower's own eating house: a family selling their own harvest by the jug, with a short menu of home cooking to go with it, often out of a garage, a courtyard or a converted shed on a farm track. Tables are trestle. The menu runs to a handful of dishes and is frequently verbal. Prices are startlingly low.
They exist because of a rule rather than a fashion. A true guachinche sells wine the family produced itself, operates only for a limited part of the year, and offers a small number of home-cooked dishes to accompany it — the Tenerife authorities regulate the format precisely to stop ordinary restaurants adopting the name. The consequence is that a genuine one has no sign, no menu outside, no card machine half the time, and shuts when the wine runs out. How to tell a real guachinche from an imitation is worth reading before you commit an evening to it.
The heartland is the northern wine belt from Tacoronte through Santa Úrsula to La Orotava, and the sensible approach is to eat at lunchtime rather than at night, since the roads are narrow and you will be drinking wine at the top of them.
The vines that are plaited like rope
Here is the detail to take away from the Orotava valley. The growers there train their vines using a method called cordón trenzado — braided cord — in which the long flexible canes of several vines are plaited together into a single thick rope that is then lifted onto low forked props and run for many metres across the terrace, sometimes fifteen or twenty of them. It exists nowhere else in the world of wine.
Nobody is entirely sure why it began. The usual explanation is that it lifted the fruit clear of damp ground in a valley that gets real rainfall, while leaving the soil beneath free to be planted with potatoes or beans — a working farm rather than a monoculture. The wines that come off it are mostly whites and light reds from listán blanco and listán negro, fresh and low in alcohol, and the wider story of Canary wine explains why vines here survived the phylloxera that flattened Europe. Driving up through the valley in summer, the plaited ropes running down the terraces look like something rigged rather than grown.
Anaga: goat, and the food of a cloud forest
The Anaga mountains at the north-eastern tip are a biosphere reserve of laurel forest, hairpin roads and hamlets that were reachable only on foot within living memory. The cooking up there is the oldest on the island.
Goat is the meat. Carne de cabra is stewed long and slow with wine, garlic, bay and paprika until it falls apart; baifo is kid goat, milder and more tender, and it is a delicacy rather than a cheap dish. Both come with potatoes and mojo and very little else. The hamlet restaurants around Taganana and the roadside spots above the coast do them best, and a day that combines a walk in the laurel forest with a long lunch is one of the better ones on Tenerife. Come down afterwards to the black-sand coast at Roque de las Bodegas and the fish restaurants there pick up where the goat left off.
Papas antiguas: potatoes with pedigree
Tenerife's highland farms grow papas antiguas, old potato varieties with a protected designation of their own, and they are not the same thing as the ordinary potato used for tourist papas arrugadas. Look for papa negra or negra yema de huevo — small, knobbly, purple-black skinned, with a deep yellow flesh and a dense, chestnut-like flavour — alongside varieties called bonita, colorada and borralla.
These are direct descendants of Andean landraces brought across in the sixteenth century, and the islands are among the earliest places in Europe to have grown the potato at all: the earliest known documentary trace of potatoes leaving Europe's Atlantic islands is a 1567 shipment sent from Gran Canaria to Antwerp. Several of the varieties still farmed on the slopes above La Orotava and Vilaflor have no surviving equivalent in South America, having been lost there and preserved here. They cost noticeably more than ordinary potatoes, they are worth it, and the papas arrugadas made with them are a different dish from the standard version.
If a menu specifies papas antiguas or names a variety, that is a kitchen paying attention and usually a signal about everything else on the list. If it just says papas arrugadas, you are getting a perfectly good ordinary potato.
Escaldón, and the gofio habit
Gofio — toasted milled grain, older on these islands than the Spanish language — turns up on Tenerife more visibly than almost anywhere. Escaldón is the form to try: gofio scalded with hot meat or fish broth and beaten into a thick paste, served in a bowl with raw onion, sometimes with a piece of cheese, and eaten alongside a stew rather than in it. Guachinches nearly always have it.
You will also meet gofio whisked into milk at breakfast, kneaded into the fist-sized pella beside a plate of salt fish, and folded into ice cream and the cornmeal pudding called frangollo. If it has defeated you in one form, try another; the full range of what Canarians do with it is wider than most visitors realise.
The north coast plate
Down on the water, Puerto de la Cruz has the best concentration of proper Canarian restaurants of any town on the island, particularly in the old fishing quarter around the harbour. Order vieja (parrotfish) if it is fresh, or cherne, or whatever the waiter steers you towards, and expect it grilled whole and priced by weight. Ordering fish por kilo is straightforward once you know to ask what your chosen fish will come to before it is cooked.
Further west, Garachico and Icod de los Vinos add two local specialities to that: cochino negro, the black Canarian pig, and some of the island's best honey. Tenerife honey carries a protected designation, and the prized one is the dark, resinous honey made when bees work the tajinaste, the towering blue-flowered spike that covers the slopes below Teide in May.
What the south does well
The resorts of the south get a bad press for food and deserve about half of it. The international restaurants along the promenades in Playa de las Américas and Costa Adeje are aimed squarely at a British and Irish market and priced accordingly, and you can eat badly there without trying. You can also eat extremely well: this coast holds most of the island's Michelin recognition, and the fine dining around Adeje and Abama is genuinely serious.
The good everyday option is to go to the working towns rather than the resorts. Las Galletas and the fishing quarter at Los Cristianos have harbourside places where the fish is local and the prices are not resort prices, and El Médano's beach bars feed a windsurfing crowd that would notice if they got lazy. Our list of where to eat across the island sets out specific choices at each end of the scale.
The other things to order once
- Carajacas — marinated calf's liver in a garlicky sauce, a bar dish, far better than the description suggests.
- Puchero or potaje de berros — the big pot dishes, best in a village bar at lunchtime. The island's soups and potajes are where the thrift and the history sit.
- Conejo en salmorejo — marinated rabbit, standard in guachinches and hill restaurants.
- Almogrote — the hard-cheese and paprika paste from La Gomera, on toast, widely served here because the ferry is short.
- Barraquito — the layered coffee with condensed milk, liqueur and lemon peel that Tenerife considers its own. Ask for it completo.
How to plan the eating
Base yourself wherever suits the rest of your holiday, but give one full day to the north. A workable version: the old university city of La Laguna in the morning for its market and its tapas streets, the Orotava valley and a guachinche for a late lunch, and the coast at Puerto de la Cruz for the evening. If you are without a car, the TITSA network covers the main north-south runs well and the mountain villages badly.
Lunch is the main meal and runs from around one until four; kitchens in the villages close firmly afterwards. Get that rhythm right and Tenerife turns out to have one of the strongest regional food cultures in the archipelago — closer in feel to a mainland Spanish wine region than to a holiday island, and considerably cheaper than either.
From here, the neighbouring islands cook the same repertoire with different emphases: Gran Canaria for cheese and city tapas, Lanzarote for volcanic wine, and Tenerife itself if you want the rest of what the island does away from the table.