An Eating and Drinking Guide to Asturias, Spain’s Land of Cider

South of the soaring cliffs and limestone monoliths of the Cantabrian mountains, the rolling dry flatlands that form much of Central Spain feel vast if not infinite. But cross the mountains, and you’ll enter a rippling countryside of verdant valleys and lush hillsides where rainstorms lash the evergreen-covered slopes.

This is the Principality of Asturias, an ancient mountain kingdom from which the Spanish monarchy traces its lineage. It’s a land of shaggy cows and low-hanging clouds, now perhaps best known for its emblematic cuisine, which celebrates harmony between the ocean, the land and the people who inhabit it.

“It’s a paradise where from the mountains you can see the sea, and from the sea you can see the mountains,” says David Fernandez-Prada, a food journalist and author who grew up in Mieres del Camino, a town just south of Oviedo, the Asturian capital.

After hosting a culinary radio show on Spain’s Cadena SER network, Fernandez-Prada traversed his homeland in an odyssey that included 230 restaurants and 100 wine bars throughout the territory. The result was his 2007 book, Dime con Quién Comes y te Diré Dónde ir en Asturias (translation: Tell me who you’re eating with and I’ll tell you where to go in Asturias), an exploration of local gastronomy from the perspective of eating as a social affair.

Bordering Cantabria to the east, Galicia to the west and the Cantabrian Sea to the north, Asturias was Iberia’s first Christian kingdom in the early Middle Ages and remained independent for much of its history, which has contributed to the region’s distinct eating and drinking culture.

In the first century A.D., the Greek geographer Strabo described Celtiberian tribes in Asturias who drank “zythos,” a drink of fermented wild apples. The tradition endured—cider has been the beverage of choice since, and its corresponding culture is a sight to behold.

The magic is in the “escanciado,” or pour, which lightly carbonates the cider before consumption. Waiters at cider houses, or sidrerias, are highly skilled and serve each glass tableside, stretching the bottle as high as possible and letting the cider fall into the tilted glass below. The resultant splash is called a culin, and must be drunk at once, as the carbonation is brief. A different variety, called sidra espumosa, is pre-carbonated, produced via double fermentation, like Champagne or Cava.

Nowadays, Asturias also makes wine, although the cider industry is far more productive. Asturias’ Cangas wine region produced just 279,300 liters in the 2023 season. By the end of the same year, Asturias produced 5.1 million liters of DOP cider. Meanwhile, Cangas is notable for its cultivation of some of Europe’s rarest grape varieties, including Albarín, Verdejo Negro and Carrasquín.

It’s not just the beverages that are distinct from the rest of Spain. Asturians will tell you the meat here is different; the animals are muscled from traversing the steep mountain slopes. The chickens, for example, called pitu de caleya (“wandering chicken” in the Asturian dialect) are enormous and have characteristically dark meat.

The milk from the free-roaming cows, sheep and goats is mixed to produce some of the world’s funkiest cheeses. The best known is Cabrales, an exceptionally strong and semi-firm blue cheese aged in caves in the snow capped Picos de Europa (Peaks of Europe). Not for the squeamish, Cabrales is nonetheless striking for its faithful demonstration of the land from which it’s forged. It tastes of the grass, the cows, the mud and the thick, stale air of an alpine cheese cave. And it’s available at just about every Asturian restaurant.

Below, we take a tour through the region’s culinary hotspots and must-try dishes, as recommended by Fernandez-Prada.

Casa Chema

Caloric density is a recurring theme in Asturian cooking. A typically heavy local dish is cachopo, essentially two beef filets hammered flat, stuffed with cheese and jamon, breaded, pan-fried in olive oil and served with french fries. Head to Casa Chema, a restaurant in the fertile hills outside of Oviedo, to try an award-winning recipe.

Chef María Joaquina ‘Joaqui’ Rodríguez, who runs the restaurant with her husband, José Luis ‘Chema’ Bernádez, serves her version, which won the title of World’s Best Cachopo in 2018, with a runny egg yolk. The meat comes from cows that guests can greet on the winding road that leads up to the restaurant.

Beyond traditional dishes, Rodríguez’s cooking also includes masterful adaptations of the meat-and-dairy-heavy Asturian fare for vegan and vegan-curious diners. This includes a Cachopo composed of homemade seitan and a smoky, roasted-tomato vegan cheese.

She believes Asturian cuisine is open to reinterpretation, which allows her to explore another, often-overlooked local speciality: fresh vegetables. “It doesn’t stop being Asturian if you adapt it to a vegan cuisine,” she says. “I come from a pretty humble family. We only ate meat on Sundays and holidays.” Try her locally grown eggplant meatballs or deep-fried zucchini, squash and sweet potato straws with cumin-dashed vegan mayonnaise.

All this, plus an expansive wine list offering several velvety, ultra-rare Asturian reds, and a platter of seriously pungent cheeses can be found on Casa Chema’s seasonal menu, served in a dining room filled with dark wood beams and mismatched decorative antiques, evocative of an aristocratic hunting cabin.

Calle Gascona

After lunch at Casa Chema, descend into Oviedo’s 1,200-year-old center for a drink on Calle Gascona, also known as “Cider Boulevard.”

Each of the 11 cider houses that now line the short but dense street serve Asturian classics like chorizo a la sidra (cider-marinated chorizo) and grilled champinoñones (forest mushrooms). It also offers abundant seafood, including battered and deep fried chunks of merluza (hake), pixin (monkfish), or enormous black-eyed prawns, boiled and lightly salted. Regardless of where you decide to sit, find a spot outside to watch the waiters playfully showcase their escanciar skills, competing for attention as they try not to splash too much cider onto the cobblestones below.

If the terraza is full and you have to dive inside, don’t be alarmed by the sticky floors, often wet with sidra spilled by waiters who got a bit too cocky. At El Pigueña, where corners are piled high with cider crates and jamon legs hang from overhead displays, sample the Ñocla (European Brown Crab) or Centollo (spider crab), which you can peek at before dinner in live tanks in the restaurant’s dining room.

Castañon’s Marta García Miranda demonstrates a proper escanciar, or cider pour. Photography by Eoin McLoughlin

Llagar Castañon

Those looking to explore the art of sidra further can head to Llagar Castañon, a cider factory just outside the coastal city of Gijon. Here, guests can observe cider-making at peak form.

In Asturias, cider science is relatively new, says Marta García Miranda, who leads Castañon’s tours and has been drinking cider since she was 15. The basics remain unchanged: the ciders are made by spontaneous fermentation with no added sugars or yeast.

The somewhat unpredictable nature of cider making in Asturias has precedent. Historically, apple growers delivered their harvests without considering varieties, so apples would get mixed up upon arrival at the factory.

Cider was also at the mercy of the Asturian climate. Once fermented, it had to be bottled or drunk quickly before the weather changed, at which point it would turn to vinegar. To prevent this, cider-makers would host parties, called espichas, during which locals would pay a small fee to enter and eat and drink until satisfied, slurping cider from wooden straws attached to the fermentation barrels.

But nowadays the Castañon family, now in its third generation of cider-making, is looking for tighter control. A stroll through the factory is a crash course in modern cider-making; from the enormous manzaneros—giant tubs outside where farmers leave the apples upon arrival—to a conveyor belt where workers manually select the best apples and send them to giant pneumatic presses. The factory has two fermentation rooms. One is modern and climate controlled, the other traditional with wood rafters and enormous wood barrels laid horizontally in an arrangement practiced for generations.

Of the 76 apple varieties permitted under the Denominación de Origen Protegida (DOP), some are more tannic, bitter or acidic. After fermenting for three to four months, the ciders in each tank, which are divided by apple variety, are tasted and mixed until equilibrium is achieved.

“The mixing is done to try and homogenize, because you know there’s a variety here that might be more acidic,” Miranda says. “So, I’m gonna give it a touch of something a bit fruitier, or with a bit more body.”

Rio Astur

In the center of Gijón, Asturias’ largest city, José Angél García’s Rio Astur offers Castañon’s full cider line and an array of Asturian ciders to sample. Fernandez-Prada says the establishment has some of the best cider in the region. But the restaurant’s main draw is García’s fabada, a rich and creamy white-bean stew, served with decadent chunks of pancetta, morcilla (blood sausage) and chorizo on the side.

Fernandez-Prada notes that this hearty dish along with pote—another regional white-bean stew with potatoes, cabbage and chunks of chorizo and blood sausage—was essential to sustaining workers in the coal mines, once the region’s economic driver.

As a judge of the annual “World’s Best Fabada” competition, he knows what goes into the best versions of the dish. “What you’re looking for is the texture of the bean,” he says. “The bean has to fall apart in your mouth and the skin has to be practically imperceptible.” García’s does just that. For full effect, alternate bites with sips of the bone-dry Emilio Martínez Sidra Brut Nature, which acts as a respite from the stew’s richness.

García’s fire-orange quisquillas, or Caridean shrimp, are another highlight. Caught in the nearby Bay of Biscay, they are served flash-boiled and unseasoned. Suck the meat from the heads, get a splash of seawater and you’ll see why they’re prepared this way. These are the sweetest of shrimps Spain has to offer, García assures, owing to their provenance in the cold, rough waters nearby. “The fish from the Cantabrian are baptized,” he says. “The product is very high quality, so why would we put garlic or lemon to detract from that flavor?”

Cadejo Gijon. Photography by Eoin McLoughlin

Cadejo Wine Bar

Gijon has only recently begun to see tourists. The city’s ancient Roman roots, remnants of the steel manufacturing industry and modernist architecture blend to form a distinctive cityscape.

One of the most Instagrammable outposts in the city is the natural wine bar Cadejo, which boasts sleek white bricks, wall-to-wall mirrors and intimate candlelight. It wouldn’t feel out of place in Brooklyn or West London. Tell your waiter what you like (there’s no wine menu here) and they’ll return with a sampling of organic bottles to try.

Particularly well represented are the Atlantic whites of northern Spain and the wines of central and Alpine France. For something interesting, try the Tronada D’Estiu orange wine from La Nave de Los Locos in Catalonia. And as you sip, snack on Cadejo’s house-made black-olive anchovy tapenade, or a platter of Iberian meats drizzled in extra virgin olive oil.

Gloria

If traditional Asturian fare gets old, Gloria, a project of sibling chefs Esther and Nacho Manzano, offers a welcome respite. At the Gijon location, flames from the open kitchen are visible from the art-deco-inspired dining room, where classic dishes are updated to modern taste. But Gloria shines most brightly in its jamon croquettes, which are quite possibly the creamiest in Spain. The recipe was nabbed directly from the Manzanos’ nearby three-Michelin-starred Casa Marcial.

Gloria’s menu also boasts modern European cuisine with global flavors, with dishes like Thai pork cheek with sweet potato puree, seaweed butter steak tartare and fresh-caught oysters with kiwi aguachile rounding out its dinner menu.

The wine list is a thorough tour of Spanish viticulture, with ample offerings from Ribera del Duero, Rioja and Rias Baixas, as well as lesser-known regions like Valdeorras and Monterrei. For a taste of something local, go for a glass of Albarín from Asturias’ Cangas region, or sample one of the menu’s nine cider varieties.