In 1952, when Pascual and Josefa Blanco opened Mesón de Pincelín in Almansa, a town in the Castilla–La Mancha region of southeastern Spain, dictator Francisco Franco had already ruled the country for more than a decade. Although the Civil War had ended thirteen years earlier, the country was still mired in repression, poverty, and the lingering consequences of the postwar years. But that year came to mark the end of more than a decade of food rationing in Spain, as families opened small bars and restaurants and tried to build a life in a nation that was still poor.
Pascual served wine and beer, while Josefa began bringing out torreznos, gachamiga, and other local dishes from the kitchen. People kept coming and, more than seven decades later, Mesón de Pincelín is still there, a survivor of the many threats that can bring down a family business—internal crises, economic downturns, and even a global pandemic—and still in the hands of the same owners.
“It started as a bar, and a little farther inside we had a patio with a grapevine,” says Diego Blanco Moreno, the founders’ grandson. In 1980, his father and uncle joined the restaurant with their wives, Diego’s mother and his aunt. The women had always run the kitchen, while the men worked front of house. Today, those roles have reversed: Diego oversees the cooking, while his cousin, Marían Blanco Tornero, acts as maître d’. Diego wants to preserve the restaurant’s traditional cooking and old recipes, he says, allowing for some innovation and adaptation to the present, “but always without losing the essence of what we have always done here.”
