La Casa Del Abuelo

Maintaining tradition since 1906

In its first years, La Casa del Abuelo started to be famous for its donuts and sweet wine. Also, for the waiter’s love to the place, some of them not being over 13 years old sometimes slept at the premises. The 20’s and 30’s arrived and with them, the idea of its founder about offering sandwiches to the customers.

Then it was time for prawns, and one way or another, their taste was delicious, so much so that La Casa del Abuelo reached the not negligible record figures of 306 kilos of grilled prawns served in just one day.

La Casa del Abuelo

La Casa del Abuelo not only became the first tavern selling chorizo, anchovies or sobrasada on bread, but got something much more difficult: selling over 1500 sandwiches in just one day. The success was so big that they had to open longer hours, from 9.00 am to 3.00 am and extend the team to 13 members. But Civil War arrived, and with it, the shortage of bread and hunger. They had to react, so in the 40’s, post-war era, the owners decided to introduce on the menu what later became the secret to their success: the prawns. For 1,60 pesetas they grilled them and served them with a glass of wine. They basically sold themselves. Later, they started to make them garlic flavoured.

Half a “prawn”,
is better than none…

This is what the owner of La Casa del Abuelo thought in 1939 when flour was scarce, right towards the end of the Civil War. He went to the market located at Puerta de Toledo and bought several kilos of prawns. It was 35 pesetas/ kilo, he received very good feedback from the customers, so he continued doing so. Without knowing, he started another tradition for La Casa del Abuelo: the one where 2 employees would go once a month to the market and spend hours choosing the best prawns coming from Huelva and Melilla.

Normally, they would choose red prawns, but sometimes they would buy white prawns. Both were generous in size and really juicy. Later, they would transport them themselves to Calle Victoria, in boxes by the kilo, with the help of a trolley. Once there, they would pile them in a frozen chamber with lots of ice, also crushed by them.

Our sweet wine

The place of origin of La Casa del Abuelo’s famous sweet wine is in Alicante. For a long time, on that tavern’s outdoor sign there would be another name: La Alicantina, where they would also sell white wine and moscatel, but none of them reached the fame of Alicante’s one.

Everything started in the 50’s, when the founder of the tavern decided going to Alicante to buy the best sweet wine. Patricio Ruiz, grandfather of the actual owners and a true wine lover, decided to manufacture it himself in his own cellar. He obtained a sweet wine, so tasty that the customers started to affectionately call it wine “El Abuelo”.

It had such a success that in 1960 Patricio had to extend his cellar (called La Cerca). At La Casa del Abuelo, they would bottle the wine after maintaining it in a very big vat, where the waiters themselves, curiously, were in charge of adding the mistela to dry wine, mixing it constantly to avoid ruining it and to secure the right taste.

In 1990, “La Alicantina” sign was removed from the premises to adopt the name that the public had “baptised” it with a while back: “La Casa del Abuelo”, thanks to the wine’s fame.

Maintaining tradition since 1906