I was in Malaga for a day, and I wanted to find a great place to eat. However, we were on a cruise…read moreand the maps provided were only for the area near the port. Due to booking a restaurant for dinner in this area (which we were checking on whether we could eat there and be back in time for sailing away), we stumbled across Restaurante Maria. (Stumble may not be accurate. I had already looked into Maria as a dining possibility since it's on the Michelin Bib Gourmand list, but was worried it was too far out from the ship.)
It was Sunday so I was surprised they were open. We walked in, we asked if we could book for dinner (and possibly cancel our dinner reservations). They aren't open for dinner on Sunday, but they were available for lunch. So after a bit of difficulty communicating (as they don't really speak English), we managed to book a table for 1:30. So we left and came back.
I'm so glad we did. The restaurant itself is a very cute, cosy place. When we walked in, our name and party number was on a post-it on the table. So they sat us down and gave us menus (they do have them in English, but they are a bit poorly translated so we looked a bit at the French menus as well). The restaurant was empty as they had just opened, but it looked as if there were bookings for practically all the tables (on a Sunday for lunch!)
We ordered foie gras and the house salad of monkfish, shrimp and prawns to start. And we ordered some random paella for our main. They gave us some sort of potatoes in a creamy sauce (possibly mayonnaise?) as an extra appetizer along with some bread and bread sticks. The potatoes were fantastic. Well, they didn't give us foie gras, they ended up giving us the Iberico ham instead. I'm glad they did as it was the best iberico I've had. It practically melted in the mouth. The salad was nice as well, but I'm just not a fan of monkfish (I keep ordering it because I want to like it though).
The paella was amazing. The best I've had so far. It was rich with chorizo and vegetables, and every bite I took made me want more. And more. But there was a lot of it. And I got full. Very very quickly. (Which meant no room for dessert unfortunately). I couldn't even eat it all (but I wanted to). They also have a pretty good wine list including an aged rioja we fell in love with. After dinner they gave us a digestif of some sort of liqueur made with herbs. We also fell in love with that as well, but didn't have much luck finding it before we left Spain.
Their paella must be really popular as they offer a paella takeaway service. After sitting there for a bit, people started to wander in but not sit. Then people would bring out a giant paella pan with an egg carton underneath for insulation and give it to those waiting and they would pay and leave. And this happened about every 10 minutes. I must have seen about 10-15 paellas leave the premise this way.
If I'm ever back in Malaga, I will be coming here again. It's totally worth it. I may have dreams about that paella.