Madrid

Mercado de Antón Martín · Calle de Santa Isabel 5

Yoka Loka is a tiny, noisy bar buried inside the Mercado de Antón Martín, with sake, chu-hi, shelves of little ochoko to choose from and, sometimes, someone deciding you should be wearing a kimono. It feels like a party, but the nigiri and rolls are the real reason to come. The sushi is genuinely at the level you expect to eat in Japan, served from this little market bar. Yoka Kamada is usually around, moving between tables, talking to everyone and making friends as she goes. The place is normally rammed and the service has the loose, slightly chaotic fun of a proper izakaya. Yoka Loka started in a ridiculous two-square-metre stall and, as it got busier, just kept swallowing more of the market.

Recoletos · Calle de Recoletos 6

NOI is the Italian restaurant in Madrid that actually bothers to be sexy. Low light, red and green, velvet, terrazzo, mirrors, and an open kitchen right in the middle of it. It feels expensive because it is trying to, and that is part of the point. Gianni Pinto’s food is just as dressed up. Familiar Italian dishes, pushed much further than usual. The spaghetti alla pummarola is a favorite: fresh tomato sauce, basil pesto, properly worked over. But this is not one of those restaurants where ordering the wrong thing ruins the evening. Get whatever sounds good. It probably is.

Goya · Calle de José Ortega y Gasset 98

Taberna del Olivo has been on Ortega y Gasset for more than thirty years making rice, and they are fucking good at it. The place is tiny and the menu just keeps throwing rice at you: a banda, negro, señoret, bogavante, carabineros, conejo con caracoles, arroz al horno, melosos, fideuàs. Rice in every direction. There is something very Spanish, and very cool, about a restaurant being this completely itself for this long. It is exactly what you picture when you think of an arrocería. Get the arroz con bogavante.

Goya · Calle de Goya 86

There are several Barriles in Madrid. Go to Goya 86 and ignore the others. The food here is much better, but more importantly this is the version that still feels like El Barril rather than a restaurant group reproducing El Barril. The bar is half the point. You can stop for a freezing Albariño, jamón and a plate of cigalas, or sit down and turn the same idea into lunch for three hours. Croquetas, gambas, almejas, zamburiñas, carabineros, chipirones, whatever seafood looks best that day, then the arroz caldoso. Some of the most expensive things in the room are sitting on ice at the bar, next to people having a glass of wine. Madrid is hundreds of kilometres from the sea and is still one of the great cities for eating shellfish. El Barril de Goya makes perfect sense here: very good seafood, very good jamón, very cold white wine. Come for a snack, come for dinner, come back next visit.

El Pardo edge · Carretera M-612, km 1.9

A filandón was traditionally a gathering around the fire: people talking, singing, telling stories and finding increasingly elaborate reasons not to go home. The restaurant has interpreted this modest folk tradition by constructing more than 7,000 square metres of lunch. There are gardens, terraces, several dining rooms, capacity for around 400 people and a kitchen organized around the grill, fish and seafood. The owners are Pescaderías Coruñesas, part of the same family universe behind O'Pazo and El Pescador, so the enormous amount of marine life on the premises is not incidental. Beyond the property is the edge of El Pardo; Madrid is technically still happening, but somebody has turned the volume down. What Filandón understands extraordinarily well is that the long Madrid lunch is not merely a meal. It needs space, time, multiple generations, several bottles and ideally some trees. Most restaurants provide tables for this. Filandón built an entire landscape around it.

Tirso de Molina · Plaza de Tirso de Molina 5

Tirso de Molina is one of those Madrid squares everyone knows and strangely few people choose to sit in. El 5 de Tirso gives you a very good reason. It is a neo-tapas bar: cañas, conservas, torreznos, croquetas, tortilla, the usual Madrid vocabulary with the volume turned slightly sideways. Then come the bravas: long golden batons made from layer after layer of potato, fried until the edges go deeply crisp, with the brava sauce sitting next to them for dipping. Pick one up, dip it, repeat. A very Madrid tapa rebuilt just enough to become exciting again.

Plaza Mayor · Calle Imperial 8

Plaza Mayor is one of Europe's great urban rooms and also one of Europe's most efficient systems for persuading people to eat mediocre lunch because the architecture is excellent. Café de la Plaza is useful because it allows the famous thing itself to remain the reason for being there without entirely surrendering to that arrangement. Inside the Pestana is a calm glazed courtyard with trees, improbably detached from the square and occupying part of a building that once contained a fire station. Outside is Plaza Mayor in full: arcades, brick, the frescoed Casa de la Panadería, crowds, waiters and several centuries of Madrid refusing to become subtle. If the weather is good, sit outside. Everybody else has noticed the square too. This has not damaged it.

Salamanca · Calle de Velázquez 41

Fisher's crossed the Atlantic carrying more than a Mexican seafood menu. It brought a particular Mexico City social habit in which seafood begins relatively early, several drinks appear, the table gets louder and whatever had been scheduled afterward gradually stops mattering. Madrid then began modifying the ingredients. Huelva prawns enter preparations with chipotle mayonnaise and beans; Balfegó tuna moves through a vocabulary developed thousands of kilometres away; whole fish receives the Fisher's treatment without anybody becoming anxious about whether the result remains sufficiently pure. The interesting thing is not Mexico being reproduced in Salamanca. It is watching a restaurant habit travel and then begin absorbing its new surroundings. Yes, Fisher's is a chain. That does not make the seafood less good.

Ibiza / Retiro · Calle de Menorca 14

La Catapa opened near Retiro in 2010, but the more unusual fact is how many of the people involved simply stayed. Miguel Ángel Jiménez built the place around product, wine and seasonality; Lawrence Obeng Essel was there at the beginning and eventually became head chef. Others worked their way upward inside the restaurant rather than treating it as a brief stop before the next opening, relaunch or aggressively photographed new concept. The food operates with similar patience. Fish when the fish is worth eating, salazones, callos, vegetables, whatever the season has made temporarily more important than everything else, and a wine culture serious enough to matter without demanding that everybody at the table develop a vocabulary about minerality. Sixteen years is not ancient. In restaurants, it is beginning to look like an argument.

Calle Rafael Calvo 20, Chamberí

In 2005, Nino and Santi Redruello stepped outside the established machinery of La Ancha and opened their first project of their own. Nino had trained with Luis Irizar and passed through kitchens including Arzak and El Bulli, then chose tortilla as the place to apply everything he had learned. Las Tortillas de Gabino took the family cooking they had inherited and made egg and potato the center of sustained inquiry: classic tortillas, truffled versions, tortillas guisadas, Torta del Casar, callos and other variations. The restaurant was named for Gabino, a cook associated with La Ancha who had passed this tortilla knowledge down through the family. Nino later described the project as something even they did not fully understand at the time: their test of whether the next generation could actually take over. Twenty years later, the restaurant reads as an answer. A generational succession was worked out through potatoes and onions.

Calle de Recoletos 11, Recoletos

Casa Canito stacks two things on top of each other: standing at a bar over cañas and vermouth, and the city’s obsession with what happened here in the early eighties. Upstairs is the taberna part: marble, stools, conservas, tortilla, sandwiches, things fried properly. The room looks back to the years when old Madrid bars and the new Madrid of La Movida were colliding everywhere at once. The name comes from Canito, drummer of Tos, whose 1980 tribute concert became one of the events folded into the mythology of that moment. Then, on the way to the bathroom, there is an old cigarette machine. Behind it: stairs. Downstairs, La Movida Madrileña takes over: vinyl, cocktails, dancing, and the same Madrid pushed from bar food into nightlife without ever really changing decades.

Plaza de Gabriel Miró 8, Las Vistillas

El Landó opened opposite Las Vistillas in 1983 and has since watched Madrid announce several times that restaurants have changed forever. Dining rooms became brighter, darker, more casual, more theatrical, more global, more local and at various points apparently required exposed brick, natural wine or chairs designed to punish the spine. El Landó kept the dark wood. Ham, callos, rabo de toro, fish from the market, broken eggs, proper waiters and regulars continued occupying the room while the present repeatedly arrived outside. This is the important distinction between stagnation and confidence: stagnation feels abandoned. El Landó feels very much in use. Its modernization strategy has been surprisingly effective. Leave the fucking room alone.

Calle Alonso Cano 37, Chamberí

Riccardo and Vittorio Figurato left careers in marketing and business to make pizza in Madrid. The Neapolitan brothers opened Fratelli in 2017 and became disproportionately serious about fermentation, flour, heat and the enormous airy cornicione. Rankings and international recognition followed, including a place at #11 in Europe in 50 Top Pizza's 2026 list. The interesting exchange remains PowerPoint for dough: two business careers traded for a pizzeria that made Madrid take the decision seriously.

Glorieta de Bilbao 7, Chamberí

Café Comercial opened in 1887, at the height of Madrid's great café culture, when intellectuals, politicians, actors, civil servants and writers could apparently spend significant portions of the working day drinking coffee, drinking something stronger and arguing about Spain. Its tertulias accumulated names including the Machado brothers, Jardiel Poncela, Mingote, Rafael Azcona and Berlanga. Madrid itself recognizes the café as one of the city's historic centenary businesses, part of a collective memory built around exactly this kind of room. The remarkable part is not that Café Comercial is old. Old things are plentiful and sometimes very boring. The achievement is that the place is still usable. People enter through the revolving door, sit beneath the mirrors, order breakfast or lunch, meet somebody, drink something and watch Glorieta de Bilbao continue outside. The historical room has not been rendered too important for ordinary life. That is why it belongs. Preservation keeps a room intact. Continuity keeps it alive. And history is considerably better when somebody is still allowed to interrupt it by ordering another coffee.

Calle de Echegaray 7, Centro

No photos. No beer. No cocktails. No tips. Your drinks are written directly onto the wooden bar in chalk. La Venencia opened in 1928 and became associated with Madrid’s Republican world during the Civil War. The story behind the photo ban is that regulars did not want to appear in anybody’s pictures because the person holding the camera might be a Francoist informer. Whether every detail of that story survives historical inspection almost matters less than the fact that, nearly a century later, somebody will still tell you to put your phone away. This is a Jerez bar. Fino, manzanilla, amontillado, oloroso, palo cortado. That is what you drink. If you came looking for a caña, you came to the wrong place. Cheese, cecina, mojama, anchovies and olives exist mainly to keep the sherry company. The room appears to have absorbed the intervening decades rather than participated in them: dark wood, old Jerez posters, barrels behind the counter, walls stained by generations of smoke. In the 1980s, the Criado brothers, university students who drank here regularly, bought the place after the previous owner died because they did not want it to disappear.

Calle de Atocha 57, Centro

The first room still looks capable of selling you a very specific hinge. La Ferretería occupies an old hardware shop from 1888, with the original wooden counter, drawers and fittings still framing the entrance. Then it drops into a sequence of old Madrid cave-like rooms below, all brick, stone and low ceilings, with contemporary art appearing where you least expect it. The food is refined Spanish cooking, and the arroces are excellent. They even come in square pans instead of the usual round ones.

Alonso Cano, Chamberí

Sala de Despiece is ridiculous in exactly the right way. The Alonso Cano room is all stainless steel, butcher rails and hooks overhead, with the food being built, rolled and torched directly in front of you. The service is half restaurant, half performance, and everyone seems completely committed to the bit. Order widely. The point is not one famous dish; it is the whole thing. The food is genuinely great, and almost every plate arrives with some small piece of theatre attached to it. It should feel gimmicky. Instead, it is just extremely fun. Madrid has plenty of very good modern restaurants. None of them really feels like this one.