DiverXO

Where Madrid's Fine Dining Ceiling Lives

Spain's high-end restaurant scene divides into two broad tiers: a cluster of two-Michelin-star creative kitchens in Madrid and across the country's gastronomic regions, and then a smaller bracket where the global ranking lists operate. DiverXO occupies that upper bracket alone in the capital. Restaurants like Coque, Deessa, Paco Roncero, and Smoked Room each hold two Michelin stars and represent a serious, technically demanding tier of creative Spanish cooking. DiverXO holds three, and has done so since chef Dabiz Muñoz earned them by the age of 33. The gap between those two levels is not purely symbolic. It shows up in demand, in the complexity of the format, and in how the restaurant registers internationally: fourth in the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2024, third the year before, and 98 points from La Liste in 2026.

For a comparison of how DiverXO sits within the broader Spanish three-star conversation, the country's other benchmark addresses include El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Arzak in San Sebastián, Azurmendi in Larrabetzu, Martin Berasategui in Lasarte-Oria, and Aponiente in El Puerto de Santa María. Each of those addresses has a defined regional identity or a clear culinary lineage. DiverXO's position within that company is unusual: it draws its reference points not from Spanish tradition but from a collision between the Asian restaurant kitchens where Muñoz trained in London — Hakkasan, Nobu, Nahm, Locanda Locatelli — and the Spanish ingredients he returned home to cook with. That cross-referencing is now the restaurant's defining structural logic.

The Flying Pigs Setting

DiverXO operates from within the NH Eurobuilding hotel in Chamartín, on Calle del Padre Damián in northern Madrid. The building itself is conventional business-hotel architecture, which makes the interior register harder on arrival. The dining room is dense with visual language: flying pig motifs appear on the walls, in the art, and on the crockery. The pigs are not incidental decoration. They trace directly to a childhood exchange in which a young Muñoz told his father he would one day own a restaurant with a queue around the corner, and his father replied, in the Spanish idiom, that pigs would fly first. The dining room's look carries that origin story as a recurring visual argument.

The physical format and the theatrical energy of the service are part of what separates this tier of creative restaurant from others at the two-star level in the same city. Comparable theatricality in international creative kitchens, such as Atomix in New York City, tends to come with a counter format and a more contained sensory register. DiverXO amplifies. The room, the plating, and the pacing of the menu are all calibrated toward a specific kind of emotional overload.

The Menu: One Format, No Alternatives

There is a single offering at DiverXO: the 'Flying Pigs Cuisine' tasting menu. No à la carte, no abbreviated format. This is a commitment the restaurant shares with a handful of Spanish peers, including DSTAgE in Madrid and Cocina Hermanos Torres in Barcelona, where the tasting menu format functions as a compositional statement rather than a commercial concession. At DiverXO, the decision reinforces the theatrical logic: the full sequence is the work, and the work requires the full sequence.

The menu crosses geographies in a way that resists easy categorisation. Documented combinations from award citation materials include Pyrenean-matured nigiri, Japanese paella, and roasted caviar served alongside vindaloo curry and Greek yoghurt. Dishes carry names rather than ingredient lists: 'Galician lobster waking up on the beaches of Goa', 'drunken crabs partying in Jerez', and the 'Minutejo del Agus', a miniature pork sandwich that references snacks Muñoz ate with his father as a child. The naming convention matters because it signals that the menu is structured around emotional and narrative registers, not around product provenance or classical technique demonstration alone. Pigeon and sherry appear in the same menu alongside multi-flavoured mochi. The structure is genuinely associative.

Spanish ingredients provide the anchoring thread. The choice is not simply patriotic: using recognisable domestic produce gives the more disorienting Asian and international references something to pivot against, making the contrast legible rather than arbitrary. Themes like invasive species and the Pyrenean ecosystem have appeared as menu-organising frameworks, which is a format more associated with Nordic kitchens than with Iberian ones, and that cross-pollination is part of what places DiverXO outside any clean national culinary category.

Seventeen Years of Reinvention

The restaurant opened in 2007, at a considerably smaller scale and in a different location. The trajectory since then has moved consistently toward greater ambition and more extreme formats, a pattern that runs counter to the tendency at many long-running creative restaurants to consolidate around a signature style and deliver it reliably. DiverXO's award trajectory reflects an upward arc rather than a plateau: it entered the World's 50 Best list at #20 in 2021 and reached #3 by 2023, a pace of ascent that is rare for a restaurant already holding three Michelin stars. A planned move to a larger space in 2025 represents the next structural evolution, scaling the operation while maintaining the intensity of the format.

The Muñoz portfolio has also expanded around DiverXO rather than diluting it. Streetxo, a casual restaurant opened in 2012 and later extended to Dubai in 2024, carries the Asian-Spanish register at lower price points. Ravioxo, launched in 2022, focuses specifically on dumplings and Asian-influenced pasta. These satellite projects function as separate addresses rather than as feeder formats, which is the model used by Le Bernardin in New York City and other three-star operations with extended creative portfolios. DiverXO has remained the controlled, high-compression version of the creative logic, while the other addresses explore its edges.

Leading Chef Awards placed Muñoz at number one in 2023. The Opinionated About Dining ranking put DiverXO sixth among European restaurants in 2025. The consistency across ranking methodologies, which weight different evidence, is a more reliable signal than any single list position, and DiverXO sits near the leading across all of them.

Planning a Visit

DiverXO operates Tuesday through Friday only, with both a lunch service running until 6:30 pm and a dinner service from 7:30 pm through to 1:00 am. The restaurant closes on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, and takes a full closure in August from the 1st through the 22nd. This is a tighter operating schedule than most of Madrid's serious creative restaurants, and it concentrates demand accordingly. Booking well in advance is not advisory caution: at this ranking level, lead times of several months are standard. The address is within the NH Eurobuilding hotel in Chamartín, a northern business district well served by Madrid's metro network. The price bracket is €€€€, consistent with the other leading creative addresses in the city, though the single-format tasting menu means the full experience rather than a selective order defines the spend.

For the broader Madrid picture, EP Club's full Madrid restaurants guide covers the range from DiverXO's tier down through the city's Michelin-starred and critically recognised addresses. The Madrid hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide complete the city planning picture for visitors building a full itinerary around a DiverXO reservation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I eat at DiverXO?

There is no menu choice to make: DiverXO serves a single tasting menu, the 'Flying Pigs Cuisine' format, across every service. The sequence runs through many courses and has included documented combinations such as Pyrenean-matured nigiri, Japanese paella, and roasted caviar with vindaloo curry and Greek yoghurt, alongside dishes named after personal and geographic references rather than their ingredient lists. The full menu is the experience. Award citations from La Liste, World's 50 Best, and Opinionated About Dining all reference the menu's hedonistic range and the use of Spanish ingredients as an anchor for more disorienting international combinations. Book the table and surrender the decision entirely to the sequence: that is the format's logic and, by all critical consensus, its reward.