A Popa Sea Club, Palma

If eating tasty Mediterranean cuisine with a side order of sea view and cooling breezes appeals to you, A Popa Sea Club restaurant at the 5-star Hotel Santos Nixe Palace ticks those boxes.

‘Popa’ is the Spanish word for the nautical term ‘stern’. It’s an appropriate name for a restaurant in a seafront hotel named after the yacht that first brought the Archduke Ludwig Salvador of Austria to Mallorca in 1872. The Nixe was anchored for years in the bay of Cala Major and was famous for its mermaid figurehead.

The hotel first opened in 1957, and famous guests included Princess Grace of Monaco and movie star Rita Hayworth. Thirty years ago, it became part of the Santos hotel family. Unlike many 5-star hotels in Mallorca, the Hotel Santos Nixe Palace is open all year.

A Popa Sea Club is the hotel’s flagship restaurant and has a beautiful, shaded terrace where the heat of the Mallorcan summer lunchtime is tempered by a caressing breeze and the sound of the waves lapping below on the sands.

Open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, A Popa Sea Club offers a new à la carte menu of Mediterranean crowd-pleasing dishes, created by executive chef Toni Busquets.

The menu offers a dozen dishes for sharing. We tried flavourful creamy croquetas of suckling pig and blood sausage with pink-tomato preserve, Russian salad with different textures of crab on toasted brioche, and grilled octopus on a potato purée with a subtle black garlic aioli. Although I’d said I’d never eat octopus again after watching THAT Netflix documentary, I must admit this dish was delicious, with the octopus being perfectly cooked.

From the main courses, we had the luxurious lobster cannelloni with a lightly spiced tomato sauce and a Kamado-grilled red shrimp (30€). A treat of a dish!

Seafood has a good showing on the menu, and our grilled turbot was served on a bed of creamy and umami-packed rice with mushrooms and red prawn aioli (38€).

There are four sweets from which to choose, and we had lemon pie – a dish that is interpreted in different ways in Mallorcan restaurants (12€). It was satisfyingly citrusy and will appeal to sweet-toothed diners.

Portions at A Popa Sea Club are generous, and guests staying in the hotel who may need a post-lunch siesta can retire to their rooms for a snooze. For anyone not lucky enough to be staying at this iconic hotel on the outskirts of Palma, there’s always the beach.

Service is as you’d expect of a 5-star establishment with a reputation for its friendly and helpful staff.

Reserving a table in the summer is recommended and a big benefit of lunching or dining at A Popa Sea Club is the valet parking – when you make your booking, tell the hotel if you’d like to take advantage of it.

Disclosure:I was invited to lunch as part of a group of journalists and influencers, but my review is an honest one.

Photos: Jan Edwards

Prices correct at time of writing.