Three chefs, one workshop
Disfrutar sits on Carrer de Villarroel in Barcelona's Eixample, behind a facade of coloured tiles that hints at the play inside. It was opened in 2014 by Mateu Casañas, Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch, three former head chefs of elBulli, and has become the clearest living heir to Ferran Adrià's workshop.
In 2024 it was named the world's best restaurant. The room is bright and modern, the pace generous; a meal here runs long, and is built to.
Illusions you can eat
The tasting menu is a run of illusions and reversals: dishes that hide, dissolve, or turn out to be something other than they seem, built on Catalan and Mediterranean flavours rather than novelty for its own sake. Spherifications, hot and cold at once, textures that should not exist.
What keeps it from being cold is joy. For all the technique, the point is delight, and it lands course after course.
Illusions you can eat, built on Mediterranean flavour.
The clearest living heir to elBulli, and proof that the avant-garde can still be joyful rather than merely clever. Worth the year's big dinner.
VANE selection. Chosen with a critic's eye and judged independently. It's here because we judged it, not because it paid. This is a researched profile, not yet a first-hand VANE verdict; where we have eaten there, the review says so.
Image: Photo: Pere prlpz, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
