A guachinche is a home eating house in the north of Tenerife where a family sells the wine from its own harvest and serves three or four homemade dishes alongside it. That is the short definition, and it is also the legal condition: if the wine is not theirs, it is not a guachinche. Everything else, the garage with plastic tables, the handwritten menu, the cash-only rule, follows from that.
This guide is the practical part: which villages they are in, how to tell a real one from a restaurant that has borrowed the name, when they open and how to get there if you plan to drink wine.
Tenerife wine tour with hotel pickup: Casa del Vino and Bodegas Monje
Tenerife wine route: to get to know a place, few things work as well as sitting down to taste what people eat and drink there. That is what this day is about. We leave the south of the island for La Laguna, a UNESCO...
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Where the guachinches of Tenerife are
In the north, and almost only there. That is neither coincidence nor fashion: they are where the vines are. The Tacoronte-Acentejo district holds most of them, and from there they spread through El Sauzal, La Matanza, La Victoria, Santa Úrsula and the La Orotava valley. Further west there is a second cluster around Icod and San Juan de la Rambla.
In the tourist south you will not find a genuine one, for the simple reason that there are no family wineries there. Anything advertised as a guachinche in Los Cristianos or Costa Adeje is a Canarian restaurant. It may be very good, but it is a different thing.
If you are staying in the south, allow a good hour’s drive up to the Tacoronte area. It is worth combining with a day around the north of the island rather than driving up only to eat.
How to spot a real one
The word is not protected as a trademark, so it gets used fairly freely. These are the signs that work, in order of reliability:
- The wine is the house’s own. Just ask; nobody takes offence. In a guachinche the wine comes from the owner’s bodega and is served in a jug or in a bottle with no commercial label. If you are handed a wine list with several wineries, you are in a restaurant.
- The menu is short and it changes. Three or four dishes, handwritten or on a board. A laminated menu with twenty options and photographs: no.
- The place was not built for it. A garage, a yard, the ground floor of a house, the winery store. Long shared tables, paper cloths, chairs that do not match.
- Cash only. Still the rule in most of them. Bring small notes and do not count on the card machine.
- It is on the Cabildo register. Authorised guachinches appear on an official list kept by the Cabildo of Tenerife. It is the dullest check and the safest one.
A smaller sign that almost never fails: they do not take bookings. You turn up, wait if you have to, and share a table without any fuss.
When they open
This is the most common visitor mistake. A guachinche is not a restaurant with fixed hours: it opens by season, according to the harvest, and closes when the wine runs out. Some stay open three months and others seven, and there is no way of knowing in advance other than asking.
In practice, this is what works:
- Friday to Sunday almost everything is open. Midweek, half of them close.
- Lunchtime is the strong moment. Many do not serve dinner at all.
- From October into spring more of them are open, because that is when the new wine is available.
- Ring ahead. The number is usually a mobile and the owner answers it.
And one consequence of all this worth accepting: the one you were recommended last year may no longer exist. Turnover is high and that is part of the deal.
What to order, and what the board actually says
The menu will be short and almost entirely in Canarian Spanish. This is what you will see:
- Queso asado con mojo. Fresh cheese off the griddle, drenched in mojo. It is always where you start.
- Papas arrugadas. Small potatoes boiled in plenty of salt, with wrinkled skins. They come with red or green mojo: red has paprika and goes with meat, green has coriander and goes with fish.
- Conejo en salmorejo. The big dish. Rabbit marinated in garlic, wine, bay and paprika, then slowly stewed. If you order one thing, order this.
- Costillas con piñas. No pineapple involved. Here piña means a boiled corn cob, served with pork ribs, potatoes and chickpeas.
- Escaldón de gofio. Gofio is toasted, milled grain, broken down in hot broth into a thick mass. It is the oldest dish on the island and the one that puzzles people most the first time.
- Carne fiesta. Marinated, fried pork cubes. Almost always on the board.
- Tollos. Strips of dried fish, usually tope shark, stewed in sauce.
You eat a great deal and pay little. Comparing it with a restaurant on the coast makes no sense: there is no menu card here, no waiting service, and the family does the cooking.
The wine, which is why the place exists at all
The wine is not the accompaniment, it is the reason. A guachinche began as the way a grower could sell off the surplus of a harvest without going through a distributor; the food came afterwards, to go with it.
What you will be poured is almost certainly a young red from listán negro, the district’s grape. It has one feature that is far from minor: phylloxera, the blight that destroyed Europe’s vineyards in the late nineteenth century, never reached the Canaries. Ungrafted, own-rooted vines survive here, along with varieties that vanished from the continent. That unlabelled jug wine comes from vines that no longer exist in Europe.
If you want to understand where it comes from, the wine route through the north takes in the Casa del Vino, a tasting and lunch at a bodega, with hotel pick-up. And if it is your first tasting, the guide to wine tasting for beginners helps.
How to get there if you are drinking
This gets overlooked and it is the most important part of the day. Guachinches sit on narrow, winding mid-slope roads, and the plan consists of drinking wine. The three options that work:
- A designated driver. The obvious one, and what local people do.
- Bus. TITSA covers the centres of Tacoronte, El Sauzal and La Matanza well, but many guachinches are a couple of kilometres outside the village, uphill. Check the specific address before relying on it.
- An excursion with a driver. The option with no complications, because you decide nothing. They are listed under food and wine tours in Tenerife.
What a guachinche is not
You understand it just as well by elimination. It is not a tasca, which is a tapas bar and can be anywhere. It is not a bodega, which makes and sells wine but does not necessarily feed you. And it is not a Canarian restaurant, even when it serves exactly the same dishes: the difference lies in who made the wine.
As for the origin of the word, the story goes that it comes from the English watching you, after the British traders who came to taste wine for export. It is the version always told and much the most entertaining, even though philologists dispute it and no document backs it up. Take it for what it is: a good story over the table.
How to fit it into the trip
A guachinche works badly as a standalone outing and very well as the close of a day in the north. The combination that comes off best: the Anaga massif or La Laguna in the morning, lunch at a guachinche near Tacoronte around two, and a quiet afternoon. Go up on a day with nothing demanding afterwards, because nobody leaves a guachinche keen to do anything at all.
If this part of the trip appeals, the guide to food tourism in the Canaries covers what to look for island by island, and the guided outings are under food and wine tours in Tenerife.
