La Tasquería

There is a particular kind of courage required to build a Michelin-starred restaurant around the parts of an animal that most fine-dining kitchens discard. Javier Estévez has built his entire reputation on precisely this act — and in doing so, he has created the most genuinely original tasting menu in Madrid. At La Tasquería, veal sweetbreads, lamb brains, pork trotters, and tripe are not supporting characters. They are the point. They arrive transformed: technically impeccable, aesthetically beautiful, often startling in their sophistication.

The restaurant moved in 2024 from its original Salamanca location to Calle Modesto Lafuente in Chamberí — a neighbourhood with the same intellectual energy and slightly less of Salamanca's decorative formality. The new space is warm and considered: exposed brick, natural light, an open kitchen that allows Estévez to observe every plate before it leaves the pass. The dining room seats enough guests to feel alive but not so many that it loses the sense of a room where something specific is happening.

The menu offers two tasting formats: the Short Anniversary Menu (aperitifs, four dishes, dessert) and the Long Anniversary Menu (aperitifs, five dishes, dessert), with a la carte options also available. Average spend lands around €76 per person — extraordinary value for a Michelin-starred experience that operates at this level of technical ambition. Wine pairings, developed with particular attention to lesser-known Spanish producers, add significantly to the experience without breaking the evening.

Signature preparations include calf's head reworked into a sequence of textures — gelatinous, crisp, yielding — that constitute a lesson in how one ingredient can carry a course through sheer technical intelligence. The bread service alone, a small thing but revealing, is better than what arrives in restaurants charging three times the price. Estévez trained under Richard Camarena in Valencia and has kept the intellectual rigour of that education while adding a distinctly Madrileño directness: this is not food that whispers. It speaks.

Estévez appeared on the Spanish television programme Top Chef, which introduced his cooking to a broader audience while simultaneously underselling the seriousness of his technical work. The Michelin star, awarded in 2019 and retained through the restaurant's move to new premises, is the more accurate measure. His kitchen operates with the discipline of a chef who knows that working with offal leaves no margin for error: a sweetbread cooked thirty seconds too long is a sweetbread lost, and there is no safety net of a flavoursome sauce to rescue the moment.

The broader context matters too. In a Madrid where bocadillos de calamares and cocido madrileño represent the city's democratic cooking, Estévez has taken that democratic spirit — the nose-to-tail philosophy that underpins working-class Spanish food — and applied Michelin precision to it. The result is a restaurant that belongs completely to its city while operating at a level entirely its own.