Menú del Día: The Spanish Set-Price Lunch
The lunch that Spain still lives by wasn't dreamed up by chefs or competition, but by a ministry. In the 1960s, the state told restaurants they had to offer a cheap set lunch, how much it could cost, and what had to be on the plate.
Menú del día, literally "the menu of the day," is the midday offer at Spanish restaurants for a single fixed price: a lighter first course, a heartier second, dessert, and bread and a drink on top. The Czech lunch menu is a close cousin - it just never had a decree standing behind it.
Menú Turístico: Lunch by Decree
Back then it went by a different name: menú turístico. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the information and tourism minister of Franco's Spain, pushed it through in 1964, and a decree from March 1965 filled in the details. Every restaurant in the country had to offer a complete lunch at an officially fixed price - from 50 pesetas at a fourth-category establishment to 250 pesetas at a luxury one - and the regulation even spelled out what had to be on it: soup or a starter, meat, fish or eggs with a side, a dessert, bread, and a quarter-liter of wine. Millions of tourists were pouring into the country every year at the time, and the government wanted to guarantee they wouldn't be ripped off at lunch. But it was mainly the locals - civil servants, factory workers, traveling salesmen - who took a liking to the cheap, complete meal. What started as tourist bait turned into a national midday ritual.
The price caps fell during the transition to democracy, but the obligation itself held on until 2010, when the EU Services Directive swept it away. What a Francoist minister had introduced, Brussels abolished forty-six years later - although a few regions, such as Navarre or Asturias, still keep the mandatory menu on their books. By then, restaurants had long realized they wanted to offer the menu even without a decree: the average menú del día costs around 14 euros today, two euros more in the Basque Country, and at midday it feeds offices and building sites all over the country. Times aren't on its side, though - some people now eat lunch at home while working remotely, and some restaurants cut costs with a half version, the medio menú, without dessert or without a drink.
How Menú del Día Works and When to Go
The rules have barely changed since the decree. The menu runs on weekdays roughly between one and four in the afternoon - Spain eats lunch late - and offers three to five choices per course from the restaurant's regular kitchen. Whatever you pick, the price doesn't budge. A drink is usually included: water, beer, or the house wine; the mandatory quarter-liter of wine has shrunk to more like a glass these days. On weekends, expect a pricier holiday version, and forget about it in the evening - anyone who asks for menú del día at eight gets an à la carte menu and a crash course in how Spaniards structure their day. And a deal dreamed up for tourists today belongs mainly to the locals: the handwritten board by the door is usually in Spanish only, and foreigners often walk right past it without noticing.
Half of Europe has its own fixed lunch at a fixed price: French cuisine has the midday formule midi, Italian has pranzo di lavoro, Portuguese has menu do dia, and Germany has the Mittagstisch. But only the Spanish one has a state decree on its birth certificate - next door, restaurants came up with their cheap lunches on their own. Across the Atlantic, similar lunches go by menú ejecutivo, and in Mexico the concept met the homegrown comida corrida; who borrowed from whom, nobody can untangle anymore. And our own lunch menu? It belongs to the same family, just the plainest cousin of them all: soup, a hot dish, and that's it.
Fifteen Euros in Bilbao
I had my menú del día in Bilbao, at the tavern Iñakiren (see Where to Eat in Bilbao), which cooks simple Basque country food and was packed with locals at lunchtime. The handwritten menu offered paella de la casa or vegetable pisto as a first course, but I went for alubias rojas con sacramentos - red beans with chorizo and chunks of meat, hearty enough to fill me up on their own. The second course was cod on tomatoes with capers: a good three hundred grams of tender, plump fish in a well-seasoned sauce. For dessert I picked a mature sheep's cheese with quince jam, salty and sweet in one bite. On top of that, they put a whole bottle of wine on the table and left it there - maybe a courtesy for foreigners, or maybe nobody here bothers counting glasses. The whole menu came to 15 EUR, according to the bill. First course, second course, dessert, bread, and wine: exactly what Fraga's decree once required. Nobody mandates it anymore. At Iñakiren, they still cook it that way.
