Arròs del senyoret was born at Baydal. The story is one for the after-lunch table: a Valencian regular would always ask for his seafood rice with everything peeled, so as not to dirty his fingers. In the kitchen they nicknamed him, fondly, «el senyoret» — the young gentleman.
At first the dish wasn't even on the menu: peeling all that shellfish was an enormous job. But he boasted about «his rice» and kept sending friends to try it, until the house gave in. That whim became the rice served along half the province: seafood rice with everything cleaned, built on a rockfish fumet and our salmorreta.
And you don't have to take our word for it: Valencian public television À Punt, the newspapers Las Provincias and Levante-EMV, and the Catalan Wikipedia all point to Baydal as the house where it was created. Since the mid-nineties, arròs del senyoret has been Calpe's official signature dish.
Other legends do the rounds — the painter Sorolla in a Valencia rice house, a Barcelona dandy and his arròs Parellada, actually a different dish — but none has a kitchen, a date or witnesses with first and last names. Ours does: the same one as always, by Calpe harbour, since July 1941.