Restaurante La Verandah — Restaurant in San Roque

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Over-cooked, over-fancy, and over-priced.

I guess that the restaurant may be slanted towards its foreign clientèle coming from Sotogrande. Which certainly makes commercial sense. For a group of Spanish people, however, it is less good. This probably explains why, on a Friday lunchtime in February, 80% of the customers were English or German, and seemed very happy with what they got.

Sited just off the main road almost at the very end of Torre Guadiaro, just before the two tower blocks, its major problem is the lack of parking. Here are three possibilities:

Parking Tip 1 : if you are very, very lucky, there will space on the curved parking place on the roundabout. That's the best place to be.

Parking Tip 2: Drive past the restaurant towards Estepona, and immediately after the two tower blocks, turn right into a rough parking area. Second best place!

Parking Tip 3. So you've been unlucky . . . drive almost all the way back to Sotogrande and turn into the Playa de Sotogrande carpark. You now have a 8-10 minute walk to the restaurant. :-)

The restaurant has a bar area, a restaurant with large windows (but nothing much to look out at), and a narrow outside terrace for smokers and their friends.

It serves a wide variety of foods, from traditional Spanish "Raciones" - that's what foreigners call "Tapas" - through Hot-dogs and Burgers to what might be called "International cuisine". All of the latter is dressed up as though it were just off to the Cambridge May Ball, with puffs of pastry, twizzles of spinach, fancy potatoes and bunches of deep-fried cherry tomatoes.

Looking at our plates it was sometimes hard to see the named main ingredient.

There were four of us. Our main courses - all fish - came on red-hot plates and had obviously been kept hot in an oven after cooking. As a result, the fish was dry and over-cooked. The salmon, the sole, the monkfish (which was in a delicious sauce but chewy like rubber) and the red mullet.

This is a crime in Andalusia where they take their fish very seriously.

The service was also extremely slow, our first-course salads took three-quarters of an hour to appear.

But the lavatories were clean and well stocked with soap, paper towels, wipes, eau-de-cologne and hand-cream. And we were given complimentary petits-fours - presumably to...

Poor. Asked for table for 4. Was told the white cloth tables were for restaurant and the no covered tables were for tapas, ok fair enough but weird. We opted for restaurant and sat down. Ordered drinks and breads arrived etc, my son as usual lumps straight into the bread and making a fair amount of mess. Anyway we couldn’t find anything we all liked, I also didn’t like the state of the table clothes, very dirty. So we had a look through the tapas menu and decide we would opt for tapas. The waiter was less than impressed and said we would need to move. Now because we had made some mess on the table, I guess this was why he wasn’t impressed and clearly expressed this. Some angry conversation ensued in Spanish. We moved tables and was completely ignored for a good 15 minutes. Finally the waitress came to take our orders, by this point I’d reached boiling point and finished our drinks anyway, so i asked for the bill...”you want the bill!”...yes I want the bill, we are leaving. We ended next door at cappricio the Italian, where nothing was too much trouble. Real shame as it was recommended to me and the food did look fantastic. They missed out on 100euro customer, moral of the story, have patience man and don’t show your customers your dissatisfaction at something so trivia. Also clean your table clothes and while your at it, wash your...

We have had two evening meals here recently. Firstly my for birthday we sat in the restaurant and enjoyed great food and service. The lobster salad was excellent, and this should have been my main as it was tasty and filling, quite a large portion. The soup my husband had was enjoyed but wasn’t too much. Our mains included the John Dory and the tempura fish. Both were excellent in presentation and taste. Far too much choice for dessert, but I settled for the tiramisu and hubby enjoyed the special of the day, the chocolate fondant. All in all it was a very good meal, taste, portions and service. Definitely recommend it and not over the top expensive (€104) for a great night out. Then we returned again to savour the tapas end of the restaurant. Again, the service and food were very good. We ended up having 4 tapas dishes between us, beet and goats cheese salad, a pork and pineapple kebab each and then lamb Tagine. This was more than enough for us, along with wine and beer it came to...