Xàbia Food & Wine Guide: Local Cuisine, Markets & Wine Estates

First-time visitors to Xàbia tend to make the same mistake. They arrive, clock the turquoise water, find a terrace facing the sea, order a beer and a plate of something fried, and spend the next few days doing exactly that. Which is perfectly pleasant. But it means they leave having barely touched the surface of one of the most quietly serious food cultures on the Costa Blanca. Xàbia – Jávea in Castilian, depending on who you ask and how much local pride is at stake – sits in the far north of Alicante province, tucked between the limestone mass of the Montgó and the Cape of Sant Antoni. Its geography has always made it slightly hard to get to and slightly easy to underestimate. That is, arguably, its greatest gift. The fishing boats still go out. The markets still smell like actual food. The wine country is forty minutes inland and almost nobody is there.

The Regional Cuisine: What Xàbia Actually Eats

The cooking of Xàbia belongs to the broader tradition of Valencian cuisine but carries its own coastal character – saltier, more direct, less interested in performance. This is a town with a working port, and the food reflects that. The Mediterranean is not a backdrop here; it is an ingredient.

Rice is the cornerstone. Not the paella that tourists photograph and locals privately wince at, but the full spectrum of Valencian rice dishes that most visitors never discover. Arròs a banda is the one worth knowing – rice cooked separately in concentrated fish stock, served with all i oli on the side and the fish presented as a second course. It is intensely savoury, deceptively simple, and completely unlike the rice dish you have been eating in coastal restaurants your whole life. Arròs amb fesols i naps – rice with white beans and turnips – is the winter version, deeply comforting in a way that defies its humble description.

Fish, of course, is treated with the seriousness it deserves. Esgarraet is a local salad of roasted red peppers, salt cod and olive oil that appears on tables the way bread appears elsewhere – automatically, before anything is asked. Coquetes, small flatbreads topped with tuna, vegetables or anchovies, appear at markets and local bars and are the kind of thing you eat three of before realising you’ve done it. Fideuà – the noodle version of paella, properly made with rossejat noodles toasted in the pan – is another regional signature worth seeking specifically.

And then there are the gambetes de la Marina: the tiny, sweet shrimp from these waters, eaten whole and almost raw, with nothing but sea salt. If you eat nothing else in Xàbia, eat these. Everything else is negotiable.

The Best Food Markets in Xàbia

The covered market in the old town – the Mercat Municipal in the historic centre, the Poble Vell – is the obvious starting point and remains the right one. Go on a weekday morning, before the heat sets in and before the tour groups materialise. The stalls are small, the vendors are focused, and the produce speaks for itself: glossy aubergines, fat tomatoes, peppers in various shades of urgency, and the local oranges and muscat grapes that make this corner of the Valencian Community quietly famous among those who know.

Thursday mornings bring a larger street market near the port area that draws both locals and residents and offers, alongside the inevitable sunhats and ceramic bowls, some genuinely good artisan food producers: local honey, olive oil in unlabelled bottles that are better than half the labelled ones, cured sausages and aged cheeses from the interior. The trick is to arrive early and follow the older local women. They know which stalls are worth stopping at. This is universal market wisdom and applies everywhere on earth.

For a more curated experience, the weekend artisan markets in summer occasionally feature producers from the Marina Alta region bringing in products you will not find in shops: cold-pressed oils, experimental vinegars, small-batch preserves. The quality is uneven but the discovery is the point.

Olive Oil and Local Producers

The olive groves around Xàbia and across the Marina Alta are older than most of the buildings visitors photograph. The dominant variety is blanqueta, a local cultivar that produces oil with a clean, slightly almond-forward character and a freshness that commercially blended oils never quite achieve. It is not the peppery, aggressive oil of Jaén. It is lighter, more subtle, and works with fish in a way that the grassy Andalusian oils sometimes don’t.

A number of small producers in the municipality and the surrounding hills press their oil traditionally and sell direct. Visiting during the November harvest season – when the air across the Marina smells vaguely of crushed olives and optimism – is one of the better reasons to travel here outside the summer peak. The oil is greener, more vivid, and aggressively good on bread at eight in the morning. Several agriturismos and rural estates in the area offer harvest experiences, combining picking participation with tastings and long lunches under the trees. This is not a bad way to spend a day.

Wine: The Marina Alta and Moscatel

The wines of the Marina Alta are not internationally famous. This is a source of minor frustration to the producers and considerable advantage to the visitor. Prices remain honest, cellars remain accessible, and the wines themselves – particularly the whites – are producing results that would cost significantly more if they had a better publicist.

The indigenous grape variety that defines the region is moscatel romano, the muscat grape that has been grown across this coastal strip since the Moorish era and possibly longer. For decades it was used almost exclusively for raisins and mistela, the sweet fortified wine used in local cooking and drunk as an aperitif with ice and a slice of lemon – which sounds unpromising and is actually rather good. But a generation of younger winemakers has begun fermenting it dry, and the results are genuinely interesting: fragrant without being floral, textured, with that characteristic Mediterranean salinity that comes from vines grown close to the sea.

The DO Marina Alta is the relevant appellation. Look for dry whites made from moscatel romano as your entry point, then explore the blends that incorporate monastrell and other indigenous varieties for the reds. The reds here are not the region’s strongest suit – the climate is better suited to whites and rosados – but the serious producers are doing careful work.

Wine Estates and Cellars to Visit

The wine country of the Marina Alta spreads inland from Xàbia through the towns of Teulada, Moraira and Benissa, and it is in this triangle that the most interesting cellar visits are concentrated. The landscape shifts from coastal scrub to terraced vineyards carved into limestone hillsides, and the light takes on a different quality – harder, whiter, more interior. You are still only forty minutes from the beach but it feels like another country.

Several of the established cooperatives in the region offer visits and tastings, including the Cooperativa Agrícola de Teulada, which has been the backbone of local wine production for decades and provides an excellent grounding in the moscatel tradition before you start exploring the more boutique producers. The cooperative’s mistela is the reference point against which everything else is measured.

Smaller family estates in the hills above Teulada and Benissa are increasingly welcoming visitors, particularly during summer and harvest season. These visits tend to be intimate, often conducted by the winemaker themselves, with tastings that include older vintages and wines not available commercially. Booking ahead is essential – these are not large operations with visitor centres and gift shops. They are working farms, and they treat you accordingly, which is to say well but without ceremony.

For a properly considered wine experience, arrange a private tour through a local guide or your villa concierge who can tailor visits to your palate and pace. Ending a cellar tour with lunch at a nearby restaurant, where the same wines appear on the list, is the correct order of operations.

Cooking Classes and Food Experiences

Learning to make a proper arròs a banda is not as simple as it looks. The ratio of stock to rice, the sequence of additions, the moment when you stop stirring and start trusting – these are things best learned from someone whose grandmother made it the same way. Cooking classes in and around Xàbia range from informal home kitchen sessions run by local cooks to more structured half-day experiences that include market visits, ingredient selection and a long lunch at the end. The latter format is the better one, partly because it teaches you to source before you cook, and partly because it ends with lunch.

Several local chefs and food producers offer personalised experiences for villa guests – paella lessons in private gardens, olive oil tastings with estate visits, guided market tours followed by cooking sessions. These can be arranged through villa management companies or directly through local contacts, and they are among the more memorable things you can do in Xàbia that don’t involve a boat.

For truffle hunters, the region is not traditionally associated with truffle production in the way that the Périgord or Castellón province is, though black truffle is found in parts of inland Valencia. A dedicated truffle experience would require a trip inland toward the Maestrat or into Aragón, which is a worthwhile excursion but a different adventure altogether. Within Xàbia, the foraging focus is more likely to be wild herbs – rosemary, thyme, fennel – and the seasonal mushrooms that appear in the Montgó after autumn rains.

The Best Food Experiences Money Can Buy in Xàbia

If you are going to spend seriously on food in Xàbia, spend it on a private fishing trip that ends with lunch. Arrange a morning on the water with a local fisherman – or through a reputable experience operator – and return to a private villa kitchen where a chef uses the morning’s catch to cook something unrepeatable. This is not a restaurant experience. It is something quieter and better.

A private dinner on a villa terrace, cooked by a local chef using produce from the Thursday market, is another category of experience that Xàbia lends itself to particularly well. The combination of evening light, local wine and food that has been chosen and cooked with specific intention is the kind of thing people talk about long after they’ve stopped being able to remember the name of the restaurant they went to on the last night.

Wine dinners at cellar estates – arranged privately and timed to coincide with harvest – are increasingly available through the better-connected local operators. These tend to involve long tables, multiple courses, wines across several vintages and the particular pleasure of eating within sight of the vines that produced the bottle in your glass. It is, frankly, a difficult thing to improve upon.

For an introduction to the broader region, the Xàbia Travel Guide covers everything from beaches to boat hire and sets the full context for a stay here.

Eating and Drinking: A Few Practical Notes

Lunch is the serious meal. Restaurants that serve a menú del día at midday – three courses, wine included, for a price that will make you briefly question everything you know about value – are doing the most honest food in town. Dinner is lighter, later, and often eaten at a time that would constitute a midnight snack in northern Europe. The Spanish schedule is not an affectation. It is climatically rational, and surrendering to it makes the entire trip better.

All i oli is not mayonnaise. It is emulsified garlic and olive oil, made without egg when done properly, and it accompanies fish, rice and almost everything else. If you are served something pale and bland from a jar, ask for another restaurant. Life is short and garlic is abundant.

The local vermut – vermouth drunk as an aperitif before Sunday lunch, with olives and anchovies – is a ritual worth adopting. It is the correct use of late morning.

Plan Your Stay

Xàbia’s food culture is best experienced slowly, from a base that gives you space and a kitchen you actually want to cook in. Whether you are sourcing from the market and cooking for twelve, or simply using the kitchen to squeeze oranges before heading out, having the right villa makes every meal better. Explore our collection of luxury villas in Xàbia and find the property that fits the way you want to eat, drink and live for a week.