Sobrino de Botín

A Guinness World Records-holding restaurant operating continuously since 1725, famous for wood-fired roast suckling pig, a Goya legend, and a starring cameo in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

What to order

Everything at Sobrino de Botín orbits one dish. The cochinillo asado — suckling pig roasted in the wood-fired oven — is what the restaurant has built three centuries of reputation on, and it arrives carved tableside with the edge of a plate rather than a knife, a small piece of theatre that doubles as a demonstration of how tender the meat is. If you only order one thing here, order that. The cordero asado, roast lamb from the same oven, is the equally traditional alternative and the choice of people who have already had the pig.

Around the roasts, the house classic is sopa de ajo, a garlic soup with a poached egg and a slug of sherry, and it has been on the menu for a very long time. Croquetas and the other starters do the job of filling out a meal without competing with the main event.

The one ordering decision worth thinking about in advance is portion size. The roast portions are generous, and sharing a single main between two people, with a soup or croquetas each first, is a legitimate way to eat here rather than a compromise — it also brings the bill down considerably.

What it costs

This is a splurge, not a budget meal, and it is better to know that before you sit down. Service is à la carte with no set menus or ticket tiers to compare. Starters run roughly €10–29, and the signature roasts — cochinillo or cordero asado — sit around €32 each. With a starter, a main and wine, expect €50–70 per person.

Travellers on a tighter budget can still get something out of the address: the historic facade costs nothing to look at, and sharing a roast between two softens the cost meaningfully. If what you actually want is a cheap, fast, excellent meal, that is a different night out — the tapas bars of La Latina are five minutes away and will feed you well for a fraction of this.

Getting a table

Reserve ahead, by phone or through the restaurant’s website. This is one of the few restaurants in Madrid where a booking genuinely matters for most of the year rather than only in high season — it is name-checked in every Madrid guidebook, and walk-in waits get long even outside the traditional Spanish late-dinner hours. Dinner is harder to get than lunch, and peak summer is harder than everything else.

Service runs daily from 13:00 to 16:00 and from 20:00 to 24:00, with the kitchen working continuously in practice; seasonal hours are worth checking before you go. Without a reservation, your best odds are turning up right at opening — 13:00 for lunch, 20:00 for dinner — which is also when the dining rooms are calmest. Weekday early seatings are the quietest of all; weekday standard hours are moderately busy; weekend evenings and any meal during peak summer are when walk-in waits stretch longest.

Plan on a full sit-down meal of 90 minutes to two hours. This is not a quick-bite stop, and hurrying through a 300-year-old dining ritual rather misses the point.

Where to sit, and how the building works

The building is centuries old and the dining rooms stack vertically, which has consequences both good and practical. Most visitors are seated in the ground-floor room; the upper floors and the cellar level are where the historic architecture feels most intact and where the crowds thin out, so it is worth asking. The cellar rooms are the oldest part of the building and the most atmospheric seating in the house.

That vertical layout means stairs between floors. If step-free access matters, call ahead to arrange ground-floor seating rather than turning up and hoping. There is no strict dress code, but smart-casual suits what is at heart a proper restaurant rather than a tapas bar. Families and children are welcome, though the formal sit-down format and the price point make this a special-occasion meal rather than a casual one with young kids. In winter the oven and the cellar rooms make the whole building a notably warm escape from the cold outside.

The wood-fired oven is the literal heart of the place and staff will sometimes allow a glimpse if you ask politely. Photography inside is generally fine for personal use — just avoid flash and don’t disrupt other diners mid-service. Look, too, for the Hemingway references worked into the decor and menu.

1725, and the stories attached to it

Sobrino de Botín holds a Guinness World Record as the oldest restaurant in the world, operating continuously since 1725. It is not a museum piece behind glass: it is a functioning kitchen still roasting pig and lamb in a wood-fired oven that has reportedly burned since the year it opened, feeding people in the same cellar rooms used for three centuries.

It was founded by Jean Botín, a French cook, and his Asturian wife, and began as something closer to an inn, where customers could bring food to be prepared, than a restaurant in the modern sense. The couple had no children, so ownership eventually passed to a nephew — sobrino is Spanish for nephew, which is where the name comes from. In the 1930s the González family acquired the property through marriage and has run it across multiple generations since.

Two legends do most of the cultural work. The restaurant’s own account, repeated by Guinness World Records, holds that a teenage Francisco Goya washed dishes here in 1765, decades before he became one of Spain’s most celebrated painters — part historical claim, part beloved story. The second is firmer: Ernest Hemingway named the restaurant and its roast pig in the closing pages of The Sun Also Rises, and Botín has leaned into the association ever since, though some scholars argue he may have had a different, similarly named establishment in mind. Either way, the place has now outlasted a COVID-era closure and failed international expansions in Miami, Mexico and Puerto Rico, and celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2025. If Goya is the reason you are curious, his work fills several rooms at the Museo del Prado a short ride east.

Before and after the meal

The restaurant sits on Calle de Cuchilleros in Los Austrias, at the foot of the stone Arco de Cuchilleros, two minutes from Plaza Mayor. Metro is Sol (Lines 1, 2, 3) or La Latina (Line 5), both five to eight minutes on foot.

For a drink before dinner or dessert-hunting afterwards, Mercado de San Miguel is a short walk away. For a longer afternoon beforehand, the Royal Palace of Madrid is about ten minutes northwest through the streets of Los Austrias. And if you want a photograph, take it outside in the early evening before the 20:00 rush fills the street: the facade framed alongside the Arco de Cuchilleros is one of the better corners in this part of Madrid, and the light is soft and the frame relatively empty at that hour. The surrounding Plaza Mayor area draws pickpocket-friendly crowds, which is a before-and-after concern rather than an inside-the-restaurant one.

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