DiverXO - Madrid
Entry hall with interesting decorations. The restaurant doesn’t serve as much pork as one might think.
Rating: 18/20
Where: Madrid, Spain
When: Dinner for 2 on 5 December 2019
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars, #4 on Top 50 Restaurants list (2022)
Why: Very inventive cooking incorporating cuisines from all over the world that sometimes misses but mostly succeeds
DiverXO is located in the modern-looking NH hotel, a bit north of Madrid's city center. The restaurant has an entrance separate from the hotel, but right next to it. Inside the restaurant there is no doubt that this restaurant has a style unlike any other Michelin-starred restaurant we've been to. Metal ants, the size of dogs, are climbing up the stairway to the dining room; cartoon flying pigs are visible everywhere. The decor has a hint of 1970s love for plastic, but is clearly custom-made for the restaurant. Curtains separate the dining tables from each other, and could presumably be closed entirely for even more privacy. In our case, they were partially open, so that we could see some tables, but not necessarily the ones closest to us.
The dinner started with a brief tour of the kitchen, followed by a glass of Cava to accompany the first few amuse bouches. There is a single tasting menu that one receives only at the end of dinner, so no choices are necessary, and all dishes come as surprises. If I had to summarize the philosophy of DiverXO, then it's that they serve riffs on familiar dishes, drawn from across the globe, updating the preparation to be fancier, more unusual or more "shocking". Here "shocking" means e.g. "frog legs", so it is relatively tame. Partway through dinner I learned that the correct pronunciation of DiverXO is "diverso", the Spanish word for "different", which is what the menu strives to be. (No divers lured by the incorrect pronunciation were seen in this restaurant.)
On to the food: the first set of dishes were a tempura-ed chicken foot, a taco made with duck tongues and a tasty salmon "nigiri-croquette". All enjoyable, and setting the scene with slightly odd ingredients.
This was followed by a set of dishes that were Indian in inspiration. "Pani puri" were small filled breads topped with jamon. This was served next to delightful breads topped with truffles. Caviar in another dish was a bit overwhelmed by the Indian spices. Dal Makhani was as good as any you'd find in a real Indian restaurant. Butter Chicken Masala had chicken replaced by frog legs (empirically verifying that frogs indeed tastes like chicken), but was otherwise lackluster.
Next was a "leftover salad from the fridge", a salad served at fridge temperature, simulating yesterday's left-overs, but obviously much more palatable. It was paired with three barbecued bites of fish (red mullet and eel), one of them divine, the other two more plain. XLB dumplings made with a beef broth filling were fine, but a far cry from really good XLBs.
Chili crab served in a crab shell was tasty, gazpacho with o-toro tuna pieces was good, but the tuna could have been of better quality.
Uni (sea urchin) was served literally "on the hand" - it would have been nice to have a hand towel before that... A nice idea supposedly recalling the chef's experience at Tokyo's Tsukiji market where he was served uni in this manner. Unfortunately, the uni was of pretty mediocre quality, and this simple dish pretty much lives or dies with the quality of the uni.
A "canape" of sucking pig skin was good, langoustine even better. The final savory course of wagyu should have been great, but was only okay, adding cream on top of the beef didn't do much for me - a truly good piece of wagyu shouldn't have needed any such "enhancement".
Desserts were tasty and artfully presented.
Overall: This was a very enjoyable dinner, with lots of inventiveness on display, and one never knew what was coming next. Many dishes were very tasty and well executed, but there were also some head-scratchers. Food-wise this could be either two or three stars, but I guess one could justify three stars by rewarding “trying to be different”, even though it doesn't always work and/or please everyone. This was definitely an experience unlike any other we’ve had at a three star Michelin restaurant 18.
