Andalusian-rooted Spanish, with the product up front. The carta leans on game, slow-cooked stews, wild fish and red tuna cut every which way, alongside daily seasonal suggestions, and runs to boquerones a la andaluza, rabo de toro deshuesado and mollejas de lechal.

Juan José and his wife Mercedes, from Cazorla in Jaén, founded La Montería in 1963, he behind the bar and she at the stoves. They cooked an Andalusian kitchen enriched with the Catalan, Basque, Navarrese and Galician traditions Juan José had picked up on his training travels. Their son Miguel Ángel Román, self-taught from childhood helping his parents, took over in 1987 and still runs it as chef-owner. In 2018 the family opened La Monte a few metres away, run by the third generation. La Montería holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a Repsol Solete.

Juan José learned to cook young: after his mother died, he and his father, who had been a cook in the Republican army during the Civil War, had to learn together. He then worked his way around Spain, from Cazorla to Jerez and Seville, Vitoria, where he learned to run a proper bar, the Costa Brava and the Huesca Pyrenees, where he fell for mar y montaña cooking. When he opened on Lope de Rueda there was very little else in the area. The tavern did well enough that a year and a half later a second Montería opened on Calle José Ortega y Gasset, later renamed Montecastela and run by his son Juan Carlos, and in 1989 came La Castela on Doctor Castelo, first called La Tercia and run by his son José Luis.

The house has a tapa named after it. The montería is a mussel with béchamel, breaded and fried inside its own shell, and the Román family has served it since 1963; generations of regulars on the Retiro tapas route know the word as much for the tapa as for the hunt. It's still first on the bar carta, at €1.50 a piece. The bar also turns out gambas en gabardina served upside down, squid rabas, rabbit thighs with confit garlic and wine poured by the glass from magnums.

The carta puts the product first: game, slow-cooked stews, wild fish and red tuna in every cut, alongside plenty of daily suggestions. Starters run from salmorejo with egg and pork loin (€10) and a warm partridge salad to calamari rabas, Andalusian-style anchovies, marinated dogfish (cazón en adobo) and porcini with egg and truffle. Then come rice with baby vegetables and partridge, red tuna with salmorejo, tuna belly with black-garlic alioli, tuna tartare with wasabi, suckling-lamb sweetbreads, boneless oxtail, venison ragout, sirloin with foie in PX, and aged beef loin by the kilo, with most mains between €17 and €25. The wine list runs from Corpinnat and cava sparkling wines through Spanish still wines.

The carta runs to about fifty dishes, and around a third of them are usually daily suggestions, so regulars tend to eat what Miguel Ángel suggests. Game, feathered and furred, offal and slow stews have always been revered here: in spring the kitchen gets through 60 kilos of oxtail a week, and when the heat arrives salmorejo, fried fish and bluefin tuna take over. There are separate bar and dining-room cartas; the dining room adds dishes like hake with red prawn, turbot a la bilbaína, a partridge puff pastry and a venison tartare. Two set menus are served to the whole table, a Menú clásico at €50 and a tasting menu at €56, and sourdough bread with an aperitif is €2.

La Montería has been refurbished three times, in 2003, 2013 and in the spring of 2021, when it took over the premises next door to give more room to the dining room and the kitchen. The look is now minimalist and Scandinavian, the tables are well spaced, and the terrace outside gathers the regulars.

The wine list leans on small producers. Sparkling runs from Carles Andreu cava (€23) and Recaredo and Gramona to grower Champagne from André Beaufort, Fallet-Gourron and Charlot; whites take in Tantaka txakoli from Álava, Sara, a Palomino from Cádiz by Pago de Mahína, natural Verdejo from Nieva by Ismael Gonzalo and Malvasía from Lanzarote. By the glass, wines start at €3, with Loirot Pagel Champagne at €10.

La Montería is open Monday to Saturday, 13:00 to 16:30 and 20:00 to midnight, and closed on Sunday. Book online through the reservation link on its site or call (+34) 91 574 18 12. Its sister, La Monte, on Calle Doctor Castelo 9-11, is open Monday to Saturday from 13:00 to midnight and on Sunday for lunch.