Las Cadenas, the La Vegueta grill where the island sits down together — and now makes wine too

On the road climbing from La Vegueta to Mancha Blanca, in the municipality of Tinajo, there is a restaurant that appears in no international guide, has no website, takes no online bookings and closes when everyone else is working. It is called Las Cadenas, and on this island everyone knows it.

It is a grill house. Its full name says so — Restaurante Grill Las Cadenas — and so does the menu: lamb chops and shoulder of lamb, pork ribs, kid goat, fillet steak with black pepper or roquefort sauce, chuletón. The dining room runs to about twenty tables, plus a separate room and a terrace. From the terrace you look out over vineyards — and those, as we shall see, are not just any view.

Whose it is

It is run by Juan Rivera, working the room with his nephew Juanito. It has been open since at least 2009, and in 2023 El Periódico de Lanzarote was already calling it «one of those classics of success» of the past twenty years, adding the line that describes it best: it works mainly with residents. This is not a place built for tourism. It is a place tourism happens to find.

The table where things get decided

Here a digression is needed that has nothing to do with food and everything to do with the island. Las Cadenas has for years been the informal table of Lanzarote politics.

In May 2025 some twenty pioneers of Canarian nationalism on the island gathered there — former mayors, founders of the parties that later merged into Coalición Canaria — and Crónicas de Lanzarote described it for what it is: the place «where you go and run into people you may not have seen in twenty or thirty years».

In April 2026 a photograph taken at one of its tables made the papers: the mayor of Arrecife, Yonathan de León, lunching with former Partido Popular figures. It took a week of rebuttals to explain that it had not been a provocation.

It does not happen in many restaurants that a photo over dessert becomes political news. It happens here because here people actually sit down together.

The vineyard out the back

And now the new part. On 16 September 2026 the regulatory board of the DO Vinos de Lanzarote admitted among its new wineries one called «Francisco Rivera – Las Cadenas».

Behind it lies a pandemic story: during covid a vineyard of twenty thousand square metres — directly behind the restaurant — was bought, recovered and planted with Malvasía Volcánica. Those vines are now five years old. The winery holds other plots, from five to thirty years old, and buys grapes from growers nearby; the oenologist is Tomás Mesa, from Tenerife, previously at El Grifo, Vega de Yuco and Guiguan. The 2024 harvest produced some five thousand bottles.

The surname is the same, the place is the same, the winery carries the restaurant's name. Whether it is the same family we have not had confirmed, so we are not writing it as a fact: we are writing it as the question worth asking on the phone when you book.

What you actually eat

The coals are the reason to go. The chuletón is the flagship: reviews mention a Friesian cut of around eight hundred grams at about €75, to share between two.

But the starters are the surprise, because they hold land and sea together in a very Canarian way: ropa vieja, fried moray eel, octopus carpaccio with burgaos, fried cheese with fig jam, croquettes. And at the end, tarta de la abuela.

The wine list ranges across several denominations of origin, with the island's malvasía whites well represented.

A verdict split down the middle

This is the most honest thing we can tell you, and it is interesting. On Google, with nearly nine hundred reviews, Las Cadenas sits around 4.5 out of 5. On TripAdvisor, with two hundred, it drops to 3.9, and the lowest sub-score is value for money: 3.7.

Translated: residents love it, and a section of the tourists argue with the bill. Two complaints recur, and both are concrete — waits at weekends when it is full, and prices, with some reports of dishes billed without being on the menu.

The lesson is simple: ask the price of the cut before it goes on the grill, as you would in any serious asador. Do that, and it remains one of the few grill houses on the island where the meat arrives the way it should.

Going

Las Cadenas — carretera La Vegueta–Mancha Blanca, La Vegueta, Tinajo.
Wednesday–Saturday 13:00–22:30 · Sunday 13:00–17:00 · closed Monday and Tuesday.
Phone 928 84 04 43 · Instagram @lascadenasgrill.

No online booking: you ring, and at weekends you should. Almost every source gives a different street number (38, 38A, 49): trust the phone and the road, not the number.

You are ten minutes from the Santuario de Los Dolores at Mancha Blanca and a quarter of an hour from the Timanfaya entrance. It is the right lunch after the volcanoes — as long as you arrive before three and it is not a Monday.