DiverXO, Madrid: Where Culinary Restraint Goes to Die — and Good Riddance
In Madrid stands DiverXO, a three-Michelin-star monument to the idea that food should hit you like a freight train rather than whisper politely in your ear. Depending on which ranking you consult, it’s sometimes called the best restaurant in the world. I didn’t come for rankings. I came to see whether the most hyped chef in Europe is actually worth surrendering an entire month’s rent for dinner.
Complexity With Intent, Not Chaos
The meal unfolds at a merciless pace — not with tiny tweezer food, but big, muscular, unapologetically flavour-forward dishes. Nearly every plate is accompanied by something else: sauces, broths, side bites, additional pieces of itself. It sounds like a mess. Somehow it isn’t.
Muñoz builds flavour like an engineer builds load-bearing bridges — nothing is decorative, nothing accidental. It’s maximalism with discipline, which is much rarer than minimalism with fear.
It begins with kohlrabi masquerading as a coconut in a creamy laksa, with skewered and grilled duck hearts perched on top like little daredevils. It shouldn’t work. It does — annoyingly well.
Then chipirones in house XO sauce with a riot of soffrito, the squid cooked to the point of indignation: soft without collapsing, elastic without rubber.
Spain Cross-Examines the World
What follows is Muñoz’s favourite mode: Spanish roots interrogating global cuisines rather than copying them.
There are peas from Zamora with Río Frío caviar baked in txuleta fat, topped with pistachio-jalapeño ajoverde and macadamia-horseradish-coconut ajoblanco. The smoky fat enveloping the peas and caviar like a silky veil which is then balanced by the creamy ajoblanco.It sounds like someone emptied a pantry blindfolded. The result is one of the best dishes I’ve eaten in years.
Ceviche with cockles, kalamata, Bangkok condiments, and homemade coconut milk arrives beside a young Thai coconut skewered with satay. It should be gimmick. It is instead precision disguised as lunacy.
Then come the dishes that make you realise Muñoz might actually be clairvoyant:
sea cucumbers hit in the wok for eight seconds, dressed in manzanilla sherry, with Canary potatoes and a fish broth;
red mullet with Seville orange broth, bitter meets ocean meets sherry in seamless harmony;
and barnacles fried with green curry, with a floral taco to slice through the richness.
By this point you stop asking “How did he think of this?” and start asking “Why doesn’t everyone cook like this?”
Poultry, Pigs, and Paella That Shouldn’t Exist
The local rooster braised in its own juices with crispy feet and pil-pil baby eels might be the clearest evidence that Muñoz is unwell in the best possible way. Rooster and eel should never meet. They meet here and immediately fall in love.
A “Minutejo del Agus”, or a pig’s-head snack with cured goose, basil, egg yolk, pecorino cheese cream, timut pepper and house sriracha — a tribute to his father — tastes like the world’s most delinquent tapa and could single-handedly end vegetarianism. Enough to say the outside “walls” of the snack are made of the pork belly of suckling pig.
Then, the cult dish: Mediterranean paella “nigiri” made with koshihikari rice imported from Tokyo containing a high level of starch and socarrat, the Spanish answer to scraping the pan for leftovers. Spain and Japan should fight over this in The Hague. And it comes with a pairing of not one but three (!) glasses of wine. Just so we keep up the variety.
Sea bream wrapped in txuleta fat with pachikay (Peruvian, Nikkei ginger-scallion) sauce arrives with a fishnet, crispy bones and a severed head because this restaurant does not fear intimidation as a plating technique.
And just when you think it’s over, there are the "leftovers": a rescoldo stew with boar ribs and caramelised vegetables, eaten with a pizza-crust shard to scrape the bottom of the pan like a criminal returning to the scene. The wild boar ribs are served with truffles and the vegetables are “overcooked” to be extremely carmalized. This is true comfort food – albeit in a very different form and fashion.
Desserts. Fine.
I’m not a dessert person. But even I admitted defeat to the mango sticky rice with Alphonso mango, chilli, sour cream, rice pudding, and frozen pesto herbs. You read that and assume disaster. It’s perfect.
Verdict
The whole experience lands like a culinary biography of obsession: Spanish heritage, global inspiration, zero compromise and not a molecule of self-doubt. It is, without exaggeration, one of the best meals of my life. On my arbitrary ten-point scale, a 9.7, only because handing out a 10 would cheapen the pursuit.
DiverXO’s new location is on the way. Logically, it shouldn’t be possible for Muñoz to stretch further without the universe snapping. Emotionally, I hope he does. And I’ll happily return — not just for the food, but because the man plays padel, and I fully intend to challenge him to a match and argue about socarrat between sets.
A must-visit. Even if you leave questioning every other restaurant you’ve ever loved.
