A dish that looks like two lines of cocaine wins a tapas contest in northern Spain

A controversial tapa simulating two lines of cocaine next to a rolled-up banknote has won the Semana del Pincho del Villazgo competition in Aldeamayor de San Martín, a village in Valladolid, in northern Spain. The winner was announced on Friday at 8pm, from the loudspeakers that had been installed in the main town square.

The winner was chosen by people who tasted the four contending dishes. "I won because people voted for me. There were no judges. To vote, you had to eat the four participating dishes and hand in a card stamped by the four bars. Then, everyone rated each proposal from one to ten and mine was the most voted," explains Jonatan Casero, the owner of a local pool bar and creator of this controversial optical illusion, which in reality consists of a small portion of Coca-Cola chicken, seasoned with smoked bacon sauce, accompanied by a 'canutillo' (a cylindrical pastry, normally with cream inside) filled with raspberry jam, and two lines of icing sugar.

The name given to this tapa is 'Un pollo de coca... Cola' - literally, 'a chicken with coke... a Cola'. According to Casero, the tapa has been a sales success: "We have sold around 600 portions at two euros each. This is accompanied by drinks, so you can say that the idea's gone very well," he says, while acknowledging that despite the results, his idea has received a lot of criticism. "I know that negative things have been said, but they haven't said anything to my face. I've seen comments in the newspaper asking for the bar to be closed down, but nobody in the village has complained," he points out.

Is this plate an apology for drugs? Casero responds: "In Valladolid's Plaza Mayor there used to be a shop selling sweets in the shape of male genitals, and teenagers queued up to eat them. This is a caricature, an eye-catcher. I doubt that anyone is going to get high because they eat this plate or stop getting high because they don't."

He stresses that minors who have recently gone to his establishment have not realised that the tapa simulates something quite different from food. "I work with children because of the type of bar I have and they don't understand it. Some of them have come, eaten it and wanted more because it's delicious and they don't understand the joke," says the barman, who will continue to offer the tapa at his bar, given the success it has had.