Kraken

About Kraken

Palma's Mercat de l'Olivar is the engine room of the city's food culture — a two-storey market where the fish stalls downstairs move more produce before noon than most restaurants do in a week. On the gallery above, ringing the fish floor, sits a circle of small bars and eateries that treat the market below as their pantry. Kraken — officially Kraken_BestiasdeMar — is the best of them, and arguably the most exciting seafood counter in Palma.

The concept is disarming. There is no menu you have to honour. The chef walks down to the market stalls in the morning, sees what came off the boats overnight at La Lonja, and builds the day's cooking around what is most alive and most available. By the time you sit down, the board is already set — red prawns from Sóller, a whole gilt-head bream, octopus that was pulled from the water six hours ago. You choose, the kitchen cooks, and the distance from sea to plate has been measured in a single morning.

What elevates Kraken above the other market stalls is precision. The staff are deadly serious about fish — how long a particular species needs on the grill, whether a given cephalopod wants olive oil or just its own broth, how to dress a raw plate so it reads savoury rather than muddled. The octopus, finished on a flat-top with crisped skin and nothing more than oil and salt, is probably the best in the city. The raw selection — carpaccios and tartares built from that morning's most delicate arrivals — is exactly the kind of cooking that rewards going early in the week, when the fish gallery has its widest range.

The setting is pleasingly rough: bar stools, an open counter, kitchen noise, the ambient bustle of a working market below. Kraken is open for lunch only and closes by mid-afternoon, which makes it a weekday Palma table rather than a holiday-dinner destination. Go on a day off and you will understand why every local chef in the city uses it as their canteen.

For a more formal seafood experience, head further up the coast. For the honest one, come here. See also Marc Fosh and the full Mallorca guide.

Best for Team Dinner

Kraken is the antidote to the Palma business lunch done badly. The setting is casual — counter stools, a working market around you, glasses that get refilled without ceremony — and yet the quality of the food is high enough that nobody at the table will feel short-changed. It is the lunch you book when you want your team to feel like they are being shown something rather than merely fed, and when the conversation needs to be loose.

The format encourages sharing. A platter of raw, two or three cooked plates in the middle, a whole grilled fish to split, perhaps a rice dish to finish — everyone gets to try everything, and the bill per head ends up remarkably reasonable for the quality. This is the table that small teams and client-free agency lunches in Palma have been quietly using for years. Pair it with an afternoon walking the old town, or with an evening at Sadrassana nearby. Browse the full Team Dinner collection for other options.