Cochinillo asado is the dish and the oven is the reason: the original holm-oak-fired oven has been in use since the house was founded. The house frames its cooking as a return to origins, respecting the raw material and putting Madrid's customs and history into each bite. Roast Castilian lamb and other traditional plates round out the carta, on the venue's own site.

Botín has served since 1725, and Guinness World Records recognises it as the oldest restaurant in the world; the 1987 edition of the Guinness book was the first to name it. The building itself is older, on record from 1590, in the web of trades streets around the Plaza Mayor that took their names from the crafts worked in them, Cuchilleros being the knife-makers. The story the house tells starts with Jean Botín, a French cook who came to Madrid with his Asturian wife hoping to cook for a noble household at the Habsburg court. In 1725 his wife's nephew, Cándido Remis, opened a small inn on Calle de Cuchilleros, closing in the old arcades of the ground floor; the name Sobrino de Botín, Botín's nephew, is still over the door. In the nineteenth century the ground floor was remodelled again, with the gilded, polychrome wooden frieze at the entrance and a pastry counter selling pestiños, bartolillos and glorias de crema. The same 1987 Guinness edition repeats the story that a teenage Goya worked there as a dishwasher around 1765. Over three centuries it has drawn royalty, politicians and public figures; Guinness names Ernest Hemingway among its visitors, and he set the closing scene of The Sun Also Rises at a cochinillo dinner there.

Early in the twentieth century Botín passed to the family that still runs it, the Gonzálezes. When Amparo Martín and her husband Emilio González took over, it was a small family business of seven people, the couple and their three children included, and only the entrance and first floor were restaurant: the cellar was a storeroom and the two upper floors were the family's home. During the Civil War Amparo and the children went to Segorbe in Castellón while Emilio stayed on, and the house was turned into a canteen for militiamen. After the war their sons Antonio and José took charge and built it into the four-floor restaurant it is today. Botín marked its 300th anniversary in 2025 with a new logo, a new website and a year of events.

The holm-oak-fired oven has been in use since the house was founded, tended by oven masters and cooks who have spent their working lives there. Suckling pigs from Segovia and lambs arrive three or four times a week and roast slowly until they turn golden. On the 2026 carta the cochinillo is €32.50 and the roast lamb €33. Around them sit Madrid and Castilian classics: garlic soup with egg and ham, callos a la madrileña, Burgos morcilla, fried breaded suckling-pig trotters, partridge stew, free-range chicken in pepitoria, the house Almejas Botín, hake baked or fried, and sole. Desserts are €7.50 to €9.50, from the Tarta Botín of sponge and custard to arroz con leche and the grandmother's-recipe cheesecake. A starter, the cochinillo and a dessert come to about €55 before drinks.

Botín has turned up in Spanish and foreign literature for well over a century. Benito Pérez Galdós mentions it in Fortunata y Jacinta (1886) and Misericordia (1896); Carlos Arniches wrote it into La Fiesta de San Antón; Ramón Gómez de la Serna devoted several greguerías to it; Graham Greene sends his characters there for lunch in Monsignor Quixote, and James A. Michener mentions it in Iberia. For many years university tunas, the student minstrel groups, played their rounds between the tables in the evenings, a tradition the house counts as part of its history.