Canarian food is what happens when an island has to feed itself from black gravel, goats and the Atlantic. There is nothing fussy about it: the ingredients are few, the techniques are old, and the results are addictive.
Begin, as every table here begins, with papas arrugadas — small potatoes boiled in heavily salted water until the skins wrinkle and dry into a fine white crust. They arrive with mojo, the sauce that defines Canarian cooking: mojo rojo, made with red pepper, garlic, cumin and paprika, warm rather than fiery; and mojo verde, greener and gentler, built on coriander or parsley, usually served with fish. Locals will tell you the potatoes should be eaten with the skin on, and they are right.
The islands' oldest food is gofio — toasted grain, milled to a fine flour, which the aboriginal inhabitants lived on centuries before Europeans arrived. It survives everywhere: stirred into fish stews to thicken them, kneaded into a dough eaten with almost anything, whipped into desserts, even spooned into a child's morning milk. Little else on a Spanish menu carries this much history.
From the goats — for a long time the island's most reliable livestock — comes fresh, semi-cured and cured cheese, often served fried and topped with mojo or with palm honey. From the sea comes the rest: vieja and cherne, salt-crusted or simply grilled; limpets grilled with garlic and green mojo; octopus; and sancocho, the salted-fish stew that appears on Sundays and at festivals. Sailors' food, in an island of sailors.
Then there is the wine. In La Geria, vines grow one by one in hollows dug into volcanic gravel, each sheltered by a low stone wall — a landscape that exists nowhere else and produces a dry, mineral MalvasÃa that tastes of the ground it came from. Finish, if you can, with bienmesabe, an almond cream whose name simply means "it tastes good to me".
Eat where the menu is short and mostly in Spanish. The best meal you will have on this island will probably cost less than the worst.