Castro, Casañas and Xatruch's Case for the Classic Menu
The elBulli inheritors run a bright Eixample dining room. First-timers order the Classic. Everyone else books twelve months ahead.
The building on Carrer de Villarroel gives you nothing. Narrow entrance, no real signage, the kind of doorway you would walk past twice looking for. Then you are inside a bright, high-ceilinged room with skylights painted with clouds, and someone is walking you past an open kitchen where three former elBulli chefs are running what the 2024 World's 50 Best called the best restaurant on earth.
Oriol Castro, Mateu Casañas and Eduard Xatruch met at Ferran Adrià's kitchen and opened Compartir in Cadaqués before this. Disfrutar is the third act. The name means enjoy. The room takes that seriously — no white tablecloths, no gloved hands, a Mediterranean-fishing-village mood over food that is anything but rustic.
The Classic is the correct first order, and the planning it costs you is the price of entry, not a flaw.
Editorial Deep
The kitchen covers a wider frame than most three-star rooms let themselves. Fire, ice, smoke and colour move across a single sitting; something crystalline arrives cold, something else arrives smoking, and both make sense against Catalan produce underneath. What it does not do is nostalgia or straight tradition — there is no set of grandmother dishes hidden in the middle to reassure you. Everything on the table is the trio's own vocabulary, built on elBulli grammar and pushed forward for a decade since.
The other diners are the first tell. On a weekday lunch it is a serious international eating crowd in their forties and up, jackets but rarely ties, a scattering of couples on obvious occasions and a few solo diners at ease. On weekend dinners the age drops and the outfits harden. Nobody is dressed for a nightclub and nobody is dressed for a boardroom; the room reads country-house-lunch more than temple.
The first sixty seconds set the tone. You walk through the unsigned door, past the open kitchen at the front, and are handed off between two staff members before you sit down — coats away, water poured, menu decision confirmed rather than presented. From there the service is precise and well-choreographed for three to four hours. Warmth is not the default setting, and on a quieter lunch the room can read cool. It is formal Catalan fine-dining service, not the family-tier warmth some readers will be expecting at this tier.
The way people overpay here is the wine pairing. At €180 on top of a €325 menu, it is the place to think twice — a strong Catalan list means a bottle chosen with the sommelier often reads better than the by-glass sequence for a table of two. The Living Table at €470 is a different evening for a group of six to eight; book it for the room, not as an upgrade to the Classic.
The named circumstance is a second visit at least a year out, on the Festival menu, at weekday lunch. The Classic is the correct introduction and the Festival is where the trio's current thinking lives — the seasonal, recent creations that rotate as the R&D kitchen downstairs works through them. Booked well ahead for a Tuesday or Wednesday lunch, the room is at its brightest under the painted skylights and the pacing has more air in it than a full evening service.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The Classic tasting menu on a first visit; Festival on the second. Cauliflower and salmon sushi with cod roe and the salty walnut candy with tonka beans and whiskey are the anchor plates.
“The elBulli inheritors' third act — book the Classic, at lunch, twelve months out.”
Go for the Classic tasting at lunch, booked as far ahead as the calendar allows. Book the Living Table only for a group of six to eight. For a lower-friction avant-garde meal in the same Eixample orbit, Enigma is the obvious redirect.
The Verdict
