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It could all have been so different for Disfrutar, the Barcelona restaurant named the best in the world for 2024 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants at a glittering ceremony in scorching Las Vegas.
“When we opened 10 years ago, in the first weeks we opened with a little menu, maybe around 65 euros per person,” says Mateu Casañas, one third of the chef team behind the restaurant, located in the Spanish city’s Eixample neighborhood, alongside Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch.
This quickly changed. After all, these are three chefs who ran the pass at elBulli, the legendary Modernist restaurant up the Catalonia coast in Roses.
“We understood in a few days that we were not there to do this. We have, inside our souls, one way to cook,” adds Casañas.
The success of Disfrutar is ultimately a story about sticking to your guns then, an inspiring tale for any budding chef or restaurateur not interested in following trends.
“When we decided to open Disfrutar together, it was not fashionable to open a restaurant with 30 plates in a degustation menu. But for us, it’s what we [wanted], it’s [what] we know. And we had one thing so clear in the beginning: that we do things [as] we want, and we never change. And today we are here.”
They are and the team’s emotion was palpable when the restaurant’s name was called out at the Las Vegas Wynn (the win was hardly a surprise, however: the restaurant has hovered around the top five for some years), with Xatruch being brought to tears on stage.
Disfrutar's dining room with a view of the pass
It was also a big night for Spain, with the ever-popular Basque restaurant Asador Etxebarri coming in at number two and Madrid’s DiverXo at number four on the list. Casañas says they “try to fly the flag” for their country, but he may be understating their impact: their food is pure Spanish Modernism and along with the likes of Quique Dacosta, Andoni Luis Aduriz (Mugaritz) and of course Albert Adrià (Enigma), they are continuously invigorating a style of cuisine that many predicted would die out with the closure of elBulli in 2011.
There’s a question now though about motivation. With three Michelin stars and a World’s Best Restaurant title, the team truly have reached the pinnacle of their profession in a quantifiable sense. Not that they seem particularly driven by accolades and as with many of their contemporaries in Spain, there is a constant desire to innovate, to keep moving and push the boundaries of gastronomy. How very elBulli.
“We are a team and we have a lot of teams behind us, but we are three people that need to be on all the projects,” says Xatruch. “We start work at nine o'clock in the morning and we try to control all the areas of the restaurant. Of course, creativity is our passion, so when we can be in the kitchen, making recipes, it's when we are [most] happy. But we have a company with three restaurants. 120 employees. So, we have a lot of work that is not just [cooking]. Minimum one day per week, we are all three together. And we talk about our cooking or the decisions we are developing. And for us, this is the way that we worked 25 years ago and the way we work today.”
The world’s best restaurant has been a quarter of a century in the making then. Some things just take time.
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