Best of the Best

Disfrutar

Barcelona

• Accolades
• The World’s Best Restaurant 2024, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna

The combination of brilliantly imaginative dishes, unsurpassed technical mastery and playful presentation results in the dining experience of a lifetime, as full of surprises as it is memories. Little wonder, then, that Disfrutar was named The World's Best Restaurant 2024, just months shy of celebrating its 10-year anniversary.

The restaurant is owned and run by three chefs: Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch and Mateu Casañas. The trio met at the legendary El Bulli (which reached No.1 in The World's 50 Best Restaurants a record-equalling five times), where each worked from a young age until its closure in 2011.

In 2012, they opened Compartir (the Spanish for 'share') in Cadaqués, before unveiling Disfrutar, meaning 'enjoy', in Barcelona in 2014. Located in the Eixample district of the Spanish city, the restaurant's exterior and entrance corridor are decorated to echo the city that surrounds it, with references to both the wrought iron found in Barcelona's many markets and the city's long tradition of ceramics.

Proceed to the dining room and things take an airy, coastal turn, with the largely white room leading onto a terrace and offering a full view of the open kitchen.

Two parallel menus are on offer, both around 30 courses. The Classic option is a greatest hits album featuring the chefs' favourite dishes from the last decade, such as the famously indulgent caviar-filled Panchino doughnut or the brilliant frozen gazpacho sandwich.

The Festival menu is the latest manifestation of the team's unbounded creativity, always backed with meticulous culinary research. A few perennial classics retain their starting spot alongside newer creations such as eel skin with sea cucumbers, eel cream and faux caviar with garum, and a pea sphere injected with sausage sauce and baby octopus, the latter playing with techniques from the trio's alma mater, El Bulli.

As its name suggests, Disfrutar does not traffic in starched white table clothes and silent servers: fun is firmly on the menu. The service style sees dishes delivered thick and fast over several hours, taking diners on the ultimate culinary rollercoaster ride.

Tableside theatre and interaction are frequent, executed with a blend of professionalism and humour. For example, the savoury courses conclude with Fear: The Prawn, where a pool of dry ice is presented to the diner, who must blindly fish into the vapour with bare hands to hunt for and retrieve perfectly cooked crustacea.

In a city renowned for gastronomic creativity, Disfrutar continues to lead from the front thanks to its ongoing innovation and singular service.

Discover 10 of the most iconic dishes at Disfrutar.

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