18.30
The doors open
Lamps on, tables dressed, easels already standing between them.
Estepona · Old Town
The paint isstill wet.
A Mediterranean kitchen, a natural wine list and working artists — all in the same room, six evenings a week.
Monday – Saturday · 6.30pm – 10.30pm
Calle Caridad 93 · Estepona
The idea
One room.
Three things happening at once.
Dinner is served. Wine is poured. And somewhere between the tables, a canvas that was blank at half past six is beginning to become something.
This is not a gallery that serves food, or a restaurant that hangs pictures. You eat inside a working studio — close enough to watch a painting arrive, to ask the artist what they are doing, and, if it stays with you, to take it home.
- 01Dinner is served.
- 02Wine is poured.
- 03A canvas is started.
An evening
What happens between half past six and closing.
19.30
The first pour
Small Spanish growers, a good number of them organic or natural. Ask — someone will have an opinion.
20.30
Work begins
An artist kneels at a canvas two metres from your table. No rope, no glass, no explanation required.
21.30
Plates arrive
Red tuna under edible flowers. Salmorejo the colour of the walls. Angus off the coals.
22.15
Something changes hands
Paintings leave with the people who watched them being made.
The restaurant
Mediterranean,
built one layer at a time.
Red tuna tartare under edible flowers. Salmorejo the colour of the walls. Iberian ham, croquetas made the way a grandmother makes them, Irish Angus over coals. Spanish wine chosen bottle by bottle — organic, natural, and from growers most lists never reach.
Live art
Painted while you eat.
Sometimes finished before you leave.
Artists take a station in the dining room and work straight through service. Guests watch, ask questions, argue gently about a colour. Children are handed paper of their own.
Some evenings a painting is started, finished and sold in the same night — to someone who was sitting three metres away when the first mark was made.
The gallery
The walls change.
Every wall in the building is hung, and the hang keeps moving — painters from Estepona, artists passing through, work made at the tables downstairs. Everything you see has a price.
Our story
It started in a small bar in Granada.
Anissa Mendez, visiting from the United States. Jorge Martínez, living an Andalusian life. Ten years apart, one message, and a restaurant built out of everything they both loved.
She paints and teaches. He runs rooms and looks after people. The Boab Tree is what happens when you refuse to choose between the two.
Estepona
Calle Caridad 93.
A narrow street in the old town — geraniums overhead, tables out on the cobbles, paintings hung on the outside wall where anyone walking past can see them. Follow them in.
