adminSome places just never quite call to you. Rico Café is one of those, for me. I have walked past it more times than I can count over the years, glanced in, and kept moving. Ask me to say what is wrong with it and I genuinely cannot. The staff seem fine. The location is as convenient as anywhere. It is not as though I have had a bad experience there and written it off. Some invisible gravitational pull simply does not exist. Other cafés make you slow down. Rico Café does not. Not for me, at any rate.
The one exception is bad weather. When the sky goes grey and the rain comes in off the sea, suddenly those big glass windows make a kind of sense. There is something almost cinematic about sitting somewhere warm and dry, watching Benidorm get wet outside, the prom thinning out as people scatter for cover. On days like that, I can see the appeal. Every other day, I walk straight past.
So when I noticed that Churreria Rico had opened its own separate spot a few doors along, dedicated entirely to churros, I paid slightly more attention. Churros are one of those things that suit a Spanish evening almost perfectly. There is something about the combination of cool air, fried dough, and dark chocolate that belongs to this part of the world. It was a cool night. We were already passing. The decision took about four seconds.
Inside, it is small and unfussy: a counter, a few tables, the smell of hot oil in the air. No pretensions, which is the correct approach for a place selling churros. You are not there for the décor.
We ordered the porras with chocolate. For anyone unfamiliar, porras are the larger, softer relation of the classic churro. Where a churro is thin, ridged, and tends towards a satisfying crispness at the edges, a porra is wider and doughier, more of a pull-apart than a snap. Done well, they sit somewhere between a doughnut and a fried breadstick, substantial without being leaden, with just enough of a crust to give the chocolate something to grip. The best ones I have had were in Madrid at six in the morning after a long night, which is arguably the correct context, though Benidorm on a cool March evening runs it reasonably close.
These were fresh, which is the main thing. Hot, properly cooked, a decent size. No complaints on the porra front.
The chocolate was another matter. A good chocolate for churros needs body, thick enough to coat whatever you dip into it, dark enough to cut through the oil and the dough without disappearing into sweetness. This one was thin. It ran straight off the porra rather than clinging to it. Instead of a proper dip you ended up with a sort of swipe, chasing the chocolate around the cup and coming away with less than you wanted. The flavour was there, just about. The texture was not.
It sounds like a minor complaint. In isolation, perhaps it is. But churros with thin chocolate is a bit like a good steak with watery gravy. The main event does its job and the accompaniment quietly undermines it. The whole point of the dipping sauce is that it finishes the thing. When it does not, you notice.
We ate, sat for a bit, and left. The cool evening made it a pleasant enough stop, twenty minutes or so, watching people go by on the street. The bill was reasonable. In the broad ledger of Benidorm eating experiences, it sits somewhere in the middle: not a disaster, not a find.
Would I go back deliberately? Probably not. There are places in Benidorm where churros are done properly, where the chocolate is thick and the whole thing arrives tasting like someone has thought about it. Once you know where those are, the merely adequate options tend to drop off the list. Churreria Rico is not bad enough to warn anyone away from. It is just not good enough to seek out.
If you are passing on a cool evening with twenty minutes to spare, it is worth a stop. Go in without great expectations and you will leave content enough.
