Rising star of the restaurant world, Mark Parris, is earning his reputation in his own restaurant in Almuñecar, a labour of love he shares with wife Sandra

“We had talked a lot about moving to Almuñécar, though not as quickly, but we just liked this place and thought it was a good time to sell what we had in England, so we sold our flat in London and invested everything we had in Los Laureles.”
It seems like setting up his own restaurant, Los Laureles, is a move that is working out beautifully for Mark Parris, who is rapidly gaining a reputation as a celebrity chef with an enviable reputation and appearances on local television. He and wife Sandra moved to Sandra’s hometown of Almuñecar in early 2007.

Mark trained as a chef in Kent then moved to London, where he worked his way up the career ladder before being appointed Head Chef at 192 in Notting Hill, which featured in the Bridget Jones films. His next appointment was The Depot in Barnes, where he met and fell in love with Andalucían beauty Sandra, from the Costa Tropical, and together they took over running The Baltic in Southwark.

One day, while bored at work and looking through the internet, they discovered a German-owned paragliding school up for sale, which they realised offered potential as a small restaurant. “This was actually the first place we looked at, and we immediately liked it,” says Mark. “A week later Sandra came here to have a look and about a month after that I came over too.”

At the time they thought it would take them a few months to gain all the paperwork needed to convert the premises for restaurant use, to install a commercial kitchen with upgraded electrics, and to completely redecorate. However, Spanish bureaucracy turned those months into a year and it would be well into the 2008 summer season before everything was finally in place.

Learning patience has been the biggest challenge, says Mark. “You have to understand that the Spanish way of doing things is completely different from the way it is in England, particularly when arranging things like permits and power supplies. People tend to tell you what they think you want to hear, and that’s not always beneficial.”

While they were waiting, the couple were spending money on day-to-day living that they had saved to convert the restaurant and equip the kitchen. As is the southern Spanish way, those they were dealing with kept saying: “It will be with you in a month, it will be with you in two months, don’t worry.”

“If we had known that the permits would have taken nearly a year, I would have gone back to England and worked to pay the mortgage comfortably,” says Mark. “Luckily we were allowed to open up the rooms so we were able to bring in a little bit of money.

“The bureaucracy of it all was the biggest problem. We would track down the person we thought was dealing with the matter and they would say it was out of their hands and they’d passed it on to somebody else, and when we managed to speak to that person they’d passed it on to yet somebody else, so we were constantly chasing everything up.”

Read the full story in our March 2008 edition.