The Best Places in Spain

A bistro with gastronomic ambitions tucked into the ground floor of a corner building near Badajoz's cathedral, Bidaia takes its name from the Basque word for journey. The short, market-driven menu changes with the seasons and pulls from personal memory, leaning heavily on traditions from northern Spain. Two set menus or à la carte, modest room, food that makes you look twice at the address.

A modern Galician restaurant a short walk from the fish market, which tells you something about how the seafood arrives. The menu leans into contemporary local cooking with clean presentation, and every dish is available in half portions, a thoughtful touch that makes the tasting logic work without committing to the full parade. Two set menus round out the options, with wine pairings available for both.

The name comes from the viticultural practice of aerating vineyard soil, which tells you something about how seriously Jerez takes its culinary roots. Juanlu Fernández runs the two-Michelin-starred LÚ Cocina y Alma nearby, and this is his looser, more everyday room: traditional Andalusian cooking with Colombian inflections woven in, a nod to his business partner. Stews, reinterpreted classics, and plates that feel inherited rather than invented.

A short walk from the Torres de Serranos, this bright, modern restaurant runs on set menus, with a lighter option at lunch and a more ambitious one come evening. Two chefs share the kitchen and keep the cooking rooted in seasonal produce while nudging traditional Valencia cuisine somewhere more contemporary. The room feels cosmopolitan without trying too hard, and the pricing is refreshingly honest for a city that knows how to charge.

The dining room is done almost entirely in red, which either sets the mood or makes you feel like you're eating inside a warning sign. This contemporary Italian restaurant in Burgos folds Castilian instincts into the Italian canon, so a cod with pilpil sauce or a caramelised panettone torrija lands with one foot in each tradition. Two tasting menus, named Fellini and Sophia Loren, sit alongside à la carte.

The walls are hung with so much art it doubles as a museum, the Museo Redondo, tucked inside what started as a wine and farm-supply shop. It's a traditional Spanish restaurant now, an old-school institution in Santander, where the menu runs to Rioja-style braised snails and hake with pepper cream. Book ahead, and let the bar talk you into an aperitif before you sit down.

Tucked into the old town's maze of pintxos bars, Bodegón Alejandro is a sit-down Basque restaurant that takes the food more seriously than the décor, which suits everyone just fine. The room feels rustic but not fussy, and the cooking follows the same logic: seasonal, local, and rooted in tradition. The menu runs from fried anchovies to cod done in pil-pil with crab, plus a tasting menu if you want the full tour.

A small, unfussy bistro in Lavapiés where a British chef cooks market-driven food with occasional homesick detours, a hash brown surfacing among the ajoblanco and chorizo without any apology. The menu rotates every few months, which keeps the regulars guessing and the kitchen honest. Patricia runs the room with the ease of someone who has done this long enough to make it look simple. The name means "butterfly" in Galician, a nod to the chef's grandmother.

A Swedish-Spanish chef with a name that will make you do a double-take runs this relaxed restaurant steps from the beach in El Campello, blending Nordic instincts with Mediterranean and regional Spanish flavors. The menu shifts three times a year and comes in tasting format or à la carte, with the gravadlax built from a family recipe worth tracking down. Nothing here feels like it's trying to impress you, which is usually when a meal does.

A snug bistro in central Cáceres named for the corn bread of Galicia and Asturias, which is either a charming quirk or a gentle provocation depending on how Extremaduran you are. The kitchen works the region's flavors with updated technique, and a tasting menu called Algarabía pairs with wines from either the local area or the wider peninsula. A dish of fried suckling pig's ear with white prawn and lime stays on permanently, though the garnish follows the season.

A short walk from the marina in Cambrils, Bresca is a contemporary Spanish restaurant with a spare, minimalist room that lets the cooking do the talking. The team runs an à la carte alongside a few set menus, all built around an updated take on Catalan tradition. Crispy pigs' trotters with black botifarra sausage should tell you which direction that update points. The name means "honeycomb" in Spanish, which feels apt for a place this quietly industrious.

A dining room that looks out over a regional castle-museum, tucked behind Falset's cooperative winery, sets the scene for this Mediterranean restaurant in El Priorat wine country. The chef also runs the celebrated Quatre Molins nearby, and that ambition shows: the menu runs from a daily set lunch to several tasting menus, all leaning on the region's produce with a quietly confident hand.

A tapas bar calling itself "the soul of an izakaya" in the middle of the Gothic Quarter, where the chef somehow also runs a farm outside the city that supplies the cheese, sobrasada, and wine. The result is Japanese technique landed on Mediterranean ingredients, served at the bar so you can watch it happen. It's small and tucked into one of those narrow streets where half the neighborhood seems to be a restaurant too.

A steakhouse near Loro Parque where the window looks straight out to sea and the meat case does most of the talking. Cuts from Uruguay, Nebraska, Germany, and Spain share the menu, many aged on the premises and sold by weight for two to share. The steak tartare is the house signature, though a T-bone or tomahawk tends to settle any remaining arguments. A family-run spot that carnivores on the island seem to find eventually.

Tucked in the basement of another restaurant, this tasting menu spot channels a genuine speakeasy feeling before you've even ordered. The kitchen opens onto the dining room, and the chef works a fusion of Basque and Mexican cooking built around local produce. The longer tasting menu is called Amakase, a riff on omakase that folds in the Basque word for mother. The concept sounds fussy on paper but the room is warmer than that.

A 30-metre whale sculpture by the road is your landmark, and once past it you're in a bright, contemporary dining room set within an outdoor art park full of palm trees, olive trees, and towering wrought iron figures. The menu reads as a modern Mediterranean spread, with tapas, regional flatbreads, and rice dishes doing the heavy lifting. Book ahead if you want the terrace in summer, which you do.

The patio terrace at this farmhouse restaurant on the road into Es Migjorn Gran books up for dinner and not much else, which tells you something about priorities. Inside, the feel is rustic with a contemporary edge, and the cooking runs on market-fresh Menorcan ingredients with French inflections. The smoked pâté de campagne is a near-permanent fixture on the menu, which regulars will tell you is exactly as it should be.

A vine-draped terrace hung with handmade murals sets the mood at this tasting-menu restaurant in a sleepy Mallorcan village, where two sisters have turned a tribute to their grandmother into something quietly serious. The single seasonal menu shifts with whatever the island is doing at that moment, rooted so firmly in Mallorcan tradition that it almost doubles as an argument for the place itself. The shop next door, selling local provisions, is a nice hint about their priorities.

Lalín is the kind of town where the local stew gets its own festival, and Cabanas, a traditional restaurant in the centre of it all, is where you go to understand why. Cocido de Lalín, built around Galician pork, anchors the menu alongside fish and seafood from the day's catch. The wine list runs to over 1,500 labels, and the in-house sommelier navigates it with the ease of someone who grew up in the cellar, which she did.

A rustic dining room with views over a landscaped terrace, this family-run Asturian restaurant near the coast is the kind of place where the menu reads like a map of the surrounding land and sea. The cooking is traditional and regional, built around local ingredients, and many dishes are sized for two, though single portions are an option. Warm and professional in equal measure, it's the sort of room that makes you order more than you planned.

An updated take on traditional Spanish cooking, tucked inside an industrial estate in a small Andalusian town, which is either a charming surprise or proof that good food goes where it wants. The chef builds two daily tasting menus around local seasonal ingredients, choosing the dishes for you, with soups, stews, and rice dishes available off-menu for anyone who prefers to steer.

Four tables in a quietly contemporary room near the Parque de Las Ciencias, and a single tasting menu that changes each season. The chef draws on French, Portuguese, and Spanish roots in equal measure, which gives the cooking a pleasantly hard-to-place character. Wine pairings are available, and a few off-menu suggestions tend to appear. Granada intimate, not Granada touristy.

The name refers to the stone the city walls are built from, and the restaurant sits right alongside them in a glass-fronted garden annexe of a historic hotel. It's a tasting-menu spot where the young chef works through the deep roots of Castilian cooking, stews and grilled meats and garden produce, though with enough modern technique that a prawn-pine-pine nut combination apparently makes sense. Finishing touches happen tableside, which keeps things lively.

Wood paneling, mountain views through the windows, and a menu that reads like a field guide to the Aragonese Pyrenees. This rustic restaurant in the center of Sallent de Gállego leans into the Alto Gállego region's culinary traditions, with local trout and Aragón veal anchoring seasonal menus alongside an à la carte option. A strong selection of Somontano wines gives the whole thing a properly regional backbone.

A tapas and wine bar tucked into a grand historic building on Via Laietana, with tall windows and Catalan Modernist detailing that make it feel like someone's very tasteful living room. The menu runs to sharing plates that lean on good local ingredients, and the wine list clears 150 labels, which is either an embarrassment of riches or a commitment problem, depending on your afternoon schedule.

A centuries-old farmhouse in the hills outside Barcelona, converted into a traditional Catalan restaurant with a semi-open kitchen and stone walls that have seen a few things. The kitchen leans on organic meat and seasonal produce, sending out rice dishes, slow stews, and cuts off the Josper grill. The pigs' trotters have their own local following. A proper country lunch spot, the kind that fills up with tables of extended families who already know the menu by heart.

A 17th-century farmhouse in a tiny stone mountain village in the Costa Brava hinterland, dressed by owners who spent years as interior decorators in Barcelona. The menu wanders between international dishes and Catalan classics, with daily market specials keeping things from getting too settled. Eat on the terrace if you can; the village square it overlooks does most of the heavy lifting for atmosphere.

The rabas here, Santander's beloved fried squid, are the kind of thing locals use to settle arguments about where to eat. Cañadío is an old-school Cantabrian restaurant with two warm dining rooms, one built around a bar and an open kitchen. The cooking runs on well-sourced ingredients and no particular interest in impressing you, which ends up being its own kind of impressive. A fixture for anyone who knows the city.

Tucked into Marbella's old quarter, this creative Mediterranean restaurant surprises by leaning Castilian, which is the last thing you'd expect from a spot this far south. The chef, a Valladolid native, weaves in fermented foods, game, and pickles alongside flavors from his home region. The bread is baked in-house daily from organic Candeal flour, following a technique he learned from a master baker back in Peñafiel.

A candlelit dining room inside the historic La Gavina hotel on the Costa Brava, where the menu moves between contemporary technique and French classical tradition. The chef draws on the guidance of Romain Fornell, whose Caelis restaurant in Barcelona has a Michelin star, and the kitchen is precise without being stiff. The Mediterranean terrace, if you can get it, makes the whole thing feel slightly cinematic in a way that's hard to argue with.

The stone façade opens onto a small bar where local products sit for sale alongside the bottles, and the dining room upstairs looks out over Plaza de España. This regional restaurant in a quiet Castilian town serves seasonal cooking rooted in the surrounding landscape, through a short à la carte and a tasting menu. The chef also runs a more elaborate operation nearby, but here the pitch is honest and unfussy. Ask for a window table when you book.

A chalkboard of daily specials is the first thing worth reading at this seasonal restaurant tucked into a narrow Gothic Quarter lane. The ground floor wraps around an open kitchen where you can watch the cooks work, while the upstairs dining room peers down at the whole scene like a mezzanine at a small theater. The menu runs traditional Catalan cooking updated just enough to feel considered rather than museum-piece.

Named after the Leonese shepherd dog, this contemporary bistro sits opposite the Roman walls on the ground floor of a hotel and runs with the warmth of a place owned by people who mean it. The kitchen leans on seasonal ingredients from León province, then nudges them somewhere unexpected with quiet fusion touches. An à la carte and a tasting menu give you options, and the burrata with mangetout and pistachio pesto has become the dish regulars order without looking up.

A terrace, a tapas bar, and several dining rooms give Casa Antonio more personalities than most restaurants bother with, and it pulls off all of them without much fuss. The menu leans into the traditional cooking of Jaén, updated just enough to feel current without losing the plot. The chef's daily set menu is worth a look, and the dessert built on a grandmother's peach punch recipe is the kind of thing that ends an argument about ordering.

A glass-fronted wine cellar and a mural of the Maceira bridge set the tone at this family-run Galician restaurant in Negreira. The front wine bar does a brisk tapas trade, while the dining room behind it runs on traditional cooking with a serious commitment to local meat. The stone-cooked T-bone is the thing people drive out here for, and the homemade cheesecake gives them a reason to linger.

A converted flour mill on the banks of the river Mula, Casa Borrego is a small gastronomic hotel where the dining room keeps the kitchen in plain sight and the terrace keeps the water in plain sight. The cooking draws on the ingredients of the Murcian mountains, offered à la carte or through set menus, in a rustic space that takes its cues from the landscape rather than from anywhere trying hard to impress.

The open grill in the main dining room is the whole story at this old-school Canarian grill house in Arucas. Beef travels from Galicia, Asturias, Uruguay, and Germany to meet it, alongside local Baifo goat chops that locals have been ordering for years. The two rustic dining rooms and private bar have the comfortable ease of a place that knows its regulars by name and has no interest in impressing anyone else.

A third-generation family cider bar in the small parish of Turón, Casa Chuchu is the kind of unpretentious Asturian chigre that feels like it was never meant to be discovered by anyone outside the valley. The short menu runs on whatever came in that day, slow-cooked into something homey and unfussy. Ham croquettes have acquired a small local legend, and the cream-filled millefeuille is the reason you pace yourself.

The dessert trolley alone will slow you down: house-made sweets wheeled to the table the old-fashioned way. This Mediterranean dining room sits inside the NH Collection Eurobuilding hotel, run by the team behind the Estimar restaurants. The cooking leans into seasonality, with pasta, stews, and serious fish doing most of the heavy lifting. Croquetas de jamón ibérico and baked wild sea bass show up often and for good reason.

A contemporary restaurant tucked beside Cuenca's famous hanging houses, in a stone building that once stored goods rather than fed people. Inside, the minimalist decor makes an interesting argument with the medieval bones of the place. The kitchen takes well-known regional dishes and quietly pulls them apart, then puts them back together differently. Two tasting menus, four courses or six, both with a wine-pairing option if you want someone else to make the decisions.

A white-walled dining room on a central plaza in Getafe, Casa de Pías is a traditional Spanish restaurant where the kitchen draws from farms, markets, and the coast, often on the same plate. Wild grouper gets braised, Galician T-bone hits the grill, and Iberian pork cheek turns up with a yellow curry that quietly ignores the traditionalist label. Private rooms are available when the occasion calls for it.

The walls of this Spanish restaurant are lined with shoe moulds, which makes sense once you learn that Valverde del Camino is the leather-working capital of Andalusia. Attached to a handsome English-style mansion turned ethnographic museum, the place runs from a tapas bar through a terrace-facing dining room to, somehow, an amphitheatre out back. The menu updates traditional dishes with a wine pairing folded into each set menu.

A family-run restaurant in the old town where the third generation has quietly taken over the kitchen and updated what their grandparents started. The menu leans hard toward the sea, with the occasional nod to Iberian pork keeping things honest. Two tasting menus sit alongside the à la carte, and the room pulls its maritime look without being obvious about it. The Michelin Guide has it on their list.

Perched in the fishing village of Lastres, this cozy regional seafood restaurant runs a traditional à la carte built around whatever came off the boats, with daily market suggestions filling in the gaps. Some of the draws, a fish and seafood caldereta or rice with lobster, need to be ordered ahead, and their cachopo won Spain's inaugural cachopo competition, which is the kind of footnote that tends to follow a dish forever.

The open grill sits in plain sight from the dining room, which tells you everything about what kind of place this is. Casa Farpón is a rustic Asturian asador where the menu follows the market, the fish comes straight off traditional boats, and the stew with compango, a tangle of regional meats, is the sort of thing people drive out to the countryside for. The cellar leans into Asturian wines, a nice touch when you're already this far in.

The menu at this family-run restaurant in Aranjuez is organized by ratio, vegetables to animal, the way a chemistry lab might classify compounds. Downstairs, an open kitchen anchors a tapas bar that fills up fast; upstairs, a wood-beamed dining room handles the slower, more considered à la carte and tasting menu. Either way, the produce from the town's famous market gardens is doing most of the talking.

A short walk from the parliament building, this casual Spanish restaurant keeps things deliberately unfussy, with ceramics, terracotta, and a menu that leans on croquettes, stews, and the grill. Medias raciones make it easy to graze rather than commit, which suits the no-fuss room well. The kitchen doesn't chase trends, and the cooking feels like it never needed to.

The entire kitchen is 18 square metres, which rules out a conventional stove or oven and leaves the chef reaching for a blowtorch and a Thermomix instead. This tiny farm-to-table spot in Terrassa does its shopping daily at the century-old market across the street, which explains why the menu skews fresh, cold, and composed. The Michelin Guide has taken notice. It's an odd, charming little place, and the constraints seem to push the cooking toward personality rather than away from it.

Three rooms, three registers: tapas bar up front, a classic dining room behind it, and a private space that edges toward modern. Casa Pedro has been feeding Puente Genil on market-driven traditional cooking long enough to have regulars who've outlasted trends. Cured meats, fresh fish, seasonal vegetables, much of it available as a half-portion if you want to range widely. The family-run service is the kind that doesn't make a show of itself.

A rambling old house in Córdoba's Jewish quarter, with dining rooms that open up in ways the narrow street outside doesn't prepare you for. This is a full à la carte restaurant built around the classics of Cordoban cooking, with meat from the Guadalquivir valley and local tuna alongside dishes that nudge carefully toward the contemporary. The rooftop terrace, when the weather cooperates, is where you want to end up.

Tucked into the Agaete Valley with coffee plantations pressing in on all sides, this family-run Canarian restaurant grows much of what it serves on its own farm. Inside, the chef runs structured tasting menus; outside on the terrace, things loosen up into something more casual. Either way, the kitchen has a sharp focus on the island's produce, reread through a modern lens. There's also a small museum on site, in case you finish dinner and think, I could learn more about mojo.

Casa Rubio sits right at the Almodóvar gate, the old Roman arch that marks the edge of Córdoba's Jewish quarter, so the location alone does half the work. It's a full sit-down restaurant with a tapas bar attached and a rooftop terrace that looks out over the old city. The kitchen does traditional Andalusian cooking with a careful eye on presentation, and the oxtail stew has been on the menu long enough to earn its own mythology.

The roast suckling pig needs to be ordered ahead, which tells you something about how seriously this place takes Segovia's most famous dish. It's a full-service restaurant with a tapas bar up front, a modern dining room, and a basement for groups. The chef grows his own vegetables and tends his own vines, then turns up to greet you himself. The menu runs from midweek lunches to a tasting menu, all rooted in the Castilian pantry.

The ground-floor pintxo bar is a scrum of tourists and locals, but upstairs the dining room gets quieter and more composed. This is a full sit-down restaurant in the old quarter, where the kitchen puts traditional Basque cooking through a careful, market-driven update. Grilled flatfish, kokotxas done three ways, and whatever looked good at the market that morning are the reasons to climb the stairs.

The dining room sits above Llafranc's beach, which means the view does a lot of the work before the food arrives. This is a family-run hotel restaurant, now in its second generation, where the cooking lands somewhere between traditional Mediterranean and quietly modern, leaning on whatever the local coast and countryside are offering. Rice dishes get their own section of the menu, which tells you something about how seriously they're taken here.

A glass-fronted kitchen and a terrace that somehow looks like it grew out of the Andalusian countryside set the mood at this rural grill house on the edge of Vejer. The reason to come is beef, catalogued by breed and age the way a serious wine list handles vintages. Pork and lamb show up too, but the whole operation exists for the fire and the cut. Couples tend to make the drive out to Pago de Santa Lucía for this one.

Lunch inside an actual castle, with the walls to prove it. This is a traditional Spanish restaurant where the kitchen leans on regional recipes, the revolconas gets a pork tongue upgrade, and the setting does more atmospheric work than any interior decorator could manage. The crowd tends toward people who drove a little out of their way on purpose, which is the right instinct. A medieval interpretation centre sits nearby for anyone who still has questions afterward.

A wine cellar stocked with over 1,200 labels is hard to ignore, and at this contemporary tasting-menu restaurant on the Alameda de Colón, it earns the wall space. The chef runs two surprise menus: one riffs on Andalucian dishes through childhood memory, the other traces a career spent in kitchens across the world. Neither lets you order à la carte, which is either a relief or the whole point.

A modern Cordovan restaurant tucked inside a sprawling sports complex, which is either the last place you'd expect to find serious cooking or exactly the right place to carb-load. The chef roots her menu in regional tradition, then nudges it somewhere more ambitious, working through tasting menus that lean on local ingredients. The Malaga goat in pepitoria is the kind of dish that makes the odd address feel beside the point.

The open fireplace and a corner stacked with fresh vegetables tell you where you are before anyone says a word. This is a Catalan restaurant set inside a large old stone house in Riudoms, where the chef often takes your order himself, which either charms you immediately or makes you nervous about changing your mind. The cooking is rooted in tradition, nudged forward with a contemporary hand, and offered à la carte or through tasting menus that lean on local markets and the fish auction.

Two chefs, one Catalan and one Andalusian, building a menu around what their two home regions share rather than where they differ. It's a contemporary tasting-menu restaurant in Reus, with a shorter and a longer menu to choose from. The cooking pulls from traditional recipes on both sides, then nudges them toward the Mediterranean with the odd French or Japanese lean. The Iberian pork served across two courses is the kind of thing people mention unprompted on the way home.

A pedestrian lane behind City Hall, named for the guild of children's shoemakers who once worked here, gave this elegant bistro its name and its small claim to Seville's layered past. The room leans toward sophisticated eclecticism, the menu toward contemporary Spanish cooking with a caviar section that signals the kitchen's ambitions. A tasting menu is available, though plenty of locals come just for the beef tartare aged with marrow.

Peking duck is the signature, and the kitchen makes a ceremony of it at this elegant, Far East-decorated Chinese restaurant in the Salamanca district. The menu moves through dim sum, Sichuan spiced chicken, and Yuxiang aubergines, with a tasting menu alongside the full à la carte. The room looks the part and the crowd dresses accordingly, which gives the whole thing a pleasantly old-world seriousness for a Chinese restaurant in Madrid.

A 16th-century stone cellar in the heart of Úbeda, hiding a tightly run contemporary Spanish restaurant with an open kitchen and no à la carte in sight. The kitchen works through two plant-based tasting menus that rotate with the seasons, and Jaén olive oil threads through nearly everything. It's the kind of place that takes itself seriously without announcing it constantly, which, in a town this pretty, is a reasonable choice.

The chef here was once Ecuador's top-ranked tennis player, which is an unusual origin story for a restaurant but explains why the menu wanders so freely across borders. This casual international spot in Málaga runs on an all-women team and serves the kind of cooking shaped by years of travel, with ceviches and seafood dishes carrying clear Latin American roots alongside other global touches. The hot-air-balloon lamps are a bit of a mood.

The staircase alone stops conversations, which is one way to announce that this isn't your average traditional restaurant. Cobo Tradición sits steps from the medieval Casa del Cordón, sharing a slick, avant-garde interior with its fancier sibling upstairs. The kitchen updates Castilian classics, morcilla de Burgos among them, without apologizing for the tradition underneath. A smart spot for the locals who still want the cooking they grew up with, just sharpened a little.