Restaurateur Stevie Benanty on the slow art of falling for Ibiza, and how a reluctant first visit turned into a full-time move.
Ask Stevie Benanty what she made of Ibiza the first time she came, and the answer isn’t the one you’d expect from someone who now calls the island home. “To me, it was Las Vegas with sand,” she laughs. “I didn’t understand the obsession.”
That first trip, 13 years ago, was far from love at first sight. “I was working with a few DJs out here and managing an artist playing locally,” she explains. Fresh from years in New York and London’s club scene, Ibiza was a hard sell. “I’d seen so many parties by then, I think anywhere would have struggled to seem special.”
The turn, when it came, was almost accidental. Their first child just a few weeks old, Stevie floated a whim. “I don’t really know what prompted me, but I said to my husband, ‘why don’t we go to Ibiza for a few weeks?’” Through his work in regenerative agriculture, they were introduced to the team behind Juntos Farm, and a side to Ibiza that was completely new to them: inland, unhurried, agricultural. “We’d always associated the island with the clubs and the parties,” she muses. “Suddenly there was this whole other side, and we completely fell in love.”
The visits multiplied after that, always to the same pocket of the island around Santa Gertrudis. “My husband and I love everything outdoors – taking the children horse riding, family hikes, exploring the beaches and farms,” she says. “It started to feel less like a holiday and more like our real life.” An easy corner to fall for, the centre and north offer their own allure away from the seasonal buzz of the south.
Everything slows to a gentler pace: secluded coves glisten, pine-backed hills beckon and whitewashed villages stay lived-in long after summer empties out. Both American, based in London at the time but with no real ties to the capital, the pull was hard to resist. “It’s funny, thinking back to that first impression,” she smiles. “But I just started to dread leaving – I’d cry on the plane home.”
Before long, they’d made the move permanent. It held few real surprises, she says – bar the logistical comedy of island post. “In London, everything arrives the next day,” she says. “Getting a package here is a challenge, but it’s a trade-off worth making.”
My family and I would look forward every year to picking our summer home in Ibiza with Domus Nova. They always had such stunning options that it was hard (but fun!) to choose. Through these weeks at the summer rentals was how we came to fall in love with Ibiza so much that we moved here permanently!
Once school and home life had settled, thoughts turned to work. Stevie had grown up around hospitality – her father ran a New York nightclub and recording studios – and having helped open one of the city’s cult underground clubs in her twenties, the instinct was there. With her children finally old enough, she pictured something slower: a little Italian deli, open while they were at school, an extension of the food-obsessed household she’d grown up in.
The restaurant, she’s the first to admit, came about by accident. Taking on the former Bottega Il Buco in Santa Gertrudis – now Stevie alla Bottega – she kept its rustic-Italian soul intact and watched it become a fixture. “It feels like you’re walking into somebody’s house,” she laughs. “It’s such a welcoming atmosphere. I feel like I know all the regulars and they all come to see us too – not just for the food, but for the conversation and the warmth.”
It went so well that a second venue followed – this one on purpose. Mira Lounge began with the owner of Gathering, the London art gallery with an Ibiza outpost in San Miguel, wandering into Bottega one November evening. “Within minutes of arriving, he’d asked, half-joking, whether I wanted another restaurant,” Stevie recalls. “It was never the plan, but it immediately felt right. I’d always had this warm feeling about San Miguel – it’s such a lovely, authentic hub just beyond the tourist spots.” After a visit the next morning, she was sold.
If Bottega is the family table, Mira is the after-hours counterpart, inspired by the relationship-run bars of New York and London she loved in her twenties – the kind of places where everyone knew everyone. “People walk in and say, ‘this feels like New York’,” she says. “And it always makes me laugh, because we’re outside, in a garden, under open sky. It’s not New York at all. But I’m so glad we’re getting the vibe right.”
A different approach to Bottega, the candlelit cocktail lounge features a custom pink bar, hand-blown glass lights and a kitchen open to experimentation. But what unites both places is who they’re for. Built for those who call the island home year-round , Stevie proved the point by opening Bottega not in the height of summer but in the quiet of autumn. “It was a big risk, because the seasonal visitors drop off at that time of year,” she explains. “But I really wanted to know who our regulars would be, and what they felt was missing.”
What was missing, in the north especially, was somewhere to go after dinner. Her ambition for Mira was specific: to become the north’s lounge – “nightlife without being a club” – with a kitchen open past midnight, vinyl sofa sessions on Sundays, and pop-ups threaded through the season. An arrangement with the neighbouring gallery allows the whole setting to move indoors in Winter; Bottega, meanwhile, brings back its long winter lunches once the beaches empty.
It’s a way of working she describes as contextual – each venue shaped to its spot rather than stamped from a template. “You’re never going to feel like you’re in a copy-paste chain,” she says. The next dream she and chef Tiago Borges share is a chiringuito, somewhere down by the water, in its own good time. For now, there’s Mira by Day, a prepared-food kitchen that stocks island fridges – increasingly holiday villas – so a good meal is waiting whenever guests are.
Home for Stevie and her family these days is Santa Eularia, though her heart stays north: hikes above Santa Agnès, afternoons at Cala Benirràs with her children, the year-round friends who, like her, chose this quieter end of the island. “It’s the same corner that first won me over, back when I was still a visitor renting through Domus Nova,” she says. “This was always our favourite place to be.” Thirteen years on from Las Vegas with sand, the reluctant visitor has become one of the north’s most generous hosts – proof that Ibiza, given long enough, tends to win you over.
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