DisfrutarWhat arrives does not look like what it is

A room that makes guests pause

Eixample, Barcelona, Spain — Avant-garde Mediterranean cooking, tasting menu only.

There is no ordering. The tasting menu is the only way through, in a classic or a seasonal version, and from the moment you sit down the meal belongs to the kitchen: its order, its length, its logic.

Courses arrive one after another with no starter or main among them and nothing in between. Somewhere in the middle the earlier plates begin to line up, and by the last one the thread they were following is visible only in hindsight.

In 2024 it took first place on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. Before that: three suns in the Repsol Guide from 2018, best chef at the National Gastronomy Awards in 2023, and restaurant of the year from the Catalan Academy of Gastronomy in 2015.

Three people, one kitchen

Mateu Casañas, Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch have their names on the site and one kitchen behind them. They met at elBulli and trained there, and what they carried out of that kitchen was a way of building a plate to be looked at before it is understood. The habit of testing an idea before giving it a name came with it.

After elBulli the three went to Cadaqués, where Compartir opened in April 2012. Two years on they came back to Barcelona, and in December 2014 the door in the Eixample opened. Between the two openings the same three people moved town, and the cooking went with them into a room facing a market, with the same three names still on the door.

The way in

The space was designed for this, and ceramics carry it from the street to the table. The entrance is keyed to Miró, the loudest colour in the building; the central corridor changes to the colour and the grain of terracotta; the main hall changes again, to tiles drawn from Mediterranean fishing villages, white and bright, so the room sits lighter than the corridor before it.

The order is deliberate. A guest comes in off the street, passes colour first, then the kitchen, and only then sits down at a table. By the time a napkin is unfolded, the work of the kitchen has already been seen once from the outside, which is a different way into a menu from reading it at the table in front of you.