🍽️Tenerife Restaurants

Tenerife's food scene runs from unpretentious local guachinches — small, often family-run bar-restaurants originally set up to sell homemade wine, now serving generous, cheap plates of Canarian home cooking — through mid-range seafood and grill restaurants along the coast, up to a handful of Michelin-starred kitchens reinterpreting Canarian ingredients at the top end. Traditional Canarian cuisine is built around a handful of dishes worth seeking out specifically: papas arrugadas (small wrinkled potatoes boiled in heavily salted water) served with mojo rojo (spicy paprika sauce) and mojo verde (herby coriander sauce); fresh grilled fish (vieja, cherne), simple and unfussy; gofio, a toasted grain flour used in everything from soups to desserts; and goat cheese from the highlands, some of it internationally awarded. Where you eat matters as much as what you order. Tourist-strip restaurants in the big resorts, with photo menus and touts outside, tend to be the most expensive and least authentic option; walking two streets inland in any town, or heading to a guachinche in the countryside around La Orotava or Tegueste, usually gets you better food for less money.

Tenerife's food scene runs from unpretentious local guachinches — small, often family-run bar-restaurants originally set up to sell homemade wine, now serving generous, cheap plates of Canarian home cooking — through mid-range seafood and grill restaurants along the coast, up to a handful of Michelin-starred kitchens reinterpreting Canarian ingredients at the top end. Traditional Canarian cuisine is built around a handful of dishes worth seeking out specifically: papas arrugadas (small wrinkled potatoes boiled in heavily salted water) served with mojo rojo (spicy paprika sauce) and mojo verde (herby coriander sauce); fresh grilled fish (vieja, cherne), simple and unfussy; gofio, a toasted grain flour used in everything from soups to desserts; and goat cheese from the highlands, some of it internationally awarded. Where you eat matters as much as what you order. Tourist-strip restaurants in the big resorts, with photo menus and touts outside, tend to be the most expensive and least authentic option; walking two streets inland in any town, or heading to a guachinche in the countryside around La Orotava or Tegueste, usually gets you better food for less money.