Mark Hix has spent the better part of forty years building a philosophy around one idea: that great cooking begins with knowing where your ingredients come from. It’s the instinct that took him from a pub kitchen in Dorset to the stoves of The Ivy, that shaped his twelve cookbooks. Eventually, it led him to step away from the restaurant world entirely and go back to the coast: fishing, foraging, and thinking about what matters on a plate.
So when TOMA & COE approached him about a culinary retreat in Andalucía, the question that interested him wasn’t the logistics. It was the ingredients.
“I’ve always been drawn to places where the food still belongs to the landscape,” he says. “Andalucía has that quality. The olive oil, the fish coming in off the Atlantic, the wines from the mountains above Málaga; it’s just what’s there.”
What makes Andalucía different?
Southern Spain is one of those places that food writers have been circling for years without fully landing on. Seville gets the attention. Granada gets the tourists. But the food landscape around Málaga — the mountain wines, the inland markets, the cortijos producing olive oil by methods that haven’t changed in generations — remains largely unknown to visitors who don’t have a reason to look.
The D.O. Sierras de Málaga is a case in point. While the world’s wine press falls over itself covering Rioja and Ribera del Duero, this mountain appellation goes almost entirely unnoticed outside Andalucía itself. A private tasting of these wines is one of the opening experiences of the Culinary HIXperience, and for most guests, it will be an introduction to something genuinely new.
Organic caviar in the most unexpected place
The most unexpected stop on the retreat is one we think guests will talk about longest.
In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, between Málaga and Granada, lies the village of Riofrío. From the road, it looks like any other Andalucían settlement — white buildings, a river, a few restaurants serving trout. Look closer, and you find the oldest organic sturgeon farm in Europe. It has been raising Acipenser naccarii, the Adriatic sturgeon native to the Guadalquivir, in spring water fed from the mountains at a constant 14°C since 1963. In 2009, it became the first caviar producer in the world to receive organic certification.
The caviar produced at Riofrío is harvested from females that take, on average, eighteen years to reach maturity. It is subtle, complex, and nothing like the briny intensity of Caspian osetra. The Culinary HIXperience includes a private tasting experience at the farm — caviar, champagne, and the story of how a Spanish doctor’s trout farm became one of the most significant gourmet addresses in Europe.
“It’s the kind of place you’d never find unless someone took you there,” says Manni Coe of TOMA & COE. “That’s exactly what we’re there to do.”
Olive oil, a cortijo and the woman behind it all
The olive grove has always been the defining landscape of Andalucía; it is ancient, productive, and deeply personal in a way that mass agriculture rarely is. The retreat includes a private tasting at a traditional cortijo farmhouse with a female organic producer; an encounter with the human side of one of the region’s most important food stories.
Olive oil tasting is often treated as a novelty in food tourism. Here, it is the point. The difference between a fresh, peppery, first-cold-press oil from a small Andalucían producer and the blended product sitting in most supermarkets is not subtle. Understanding it changes how you cook. Mark Hix has spent a career arguing that provenance is everything. This is where that argument is settled.
Cooking with what’s there
On the second morning of the retreat, Mark leads the group through Málaga’s central market. This is not a staged experience. It is a working market visit with a working chef, watching how someone with his background thinks when confronted with a stall of just-landed fish or a box of juicy tomatoes.
What he selects in the morning appears on the table that evening. In total, two private dinners, prepared by Mark at the group’s exclusive historic villa in Cuevas Bajas, form the culinary heart of the retreat. The cooking is, in the best sense, improvisational; led by what the market offered, shaped by the landscape the group has been moving through.
The Culinary Hixperience
The Culinary HIXperience runs from 10 to 13 September 2026. It is limited to ten guests. Accommodation is one night at a boutique four-star hotel in Málaga and two nights at an exclusively reserved restored historic villa. Group transport, two lunches, a welcome dinner, two private dinners and all tastings are included. The retreat is conducted in English.
September in Andalucía is the month the region belongs to itself again, the summer crowds have thinned, the heat has softened to something manageable, and the harvest season is beginning. It is, in short, the right time.
From €2,950 per person (double occupancy). Flights and transfers not included.
