L'Aliança d'Anglès

A Century-Old Building, a Farming Cooperative, and a Michelin Star

Carrer Jacint Verdaguer is a quiet street in Anglès, a small town in the Girona province where the Ter and Brugent rivers meet. The building at number 3 does not announce itself loudly. Its late nineteenth-century architecture carries the measured solidity of an era when Catalan rural communities built for permanence. Step inside and the vintage decorative details speak to a specific institutional past: this structure began life in 1919 as a casino and social club for a cooperative of local farmers. That history is not incidental. It shapes everything about how L'Aliança d'Anglès positions itself, and why dining here reads differently from booking a tasting menu in a purpose-built city restaurant.

The Feliu family have held the building since the 1950s, and the current iteration of the restaurant represents its most ambitious chapter. Chef Àlex Carrera, working alongside Cristina Feliu, brought the kitchen a formation earned at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, one of the foundational addresses of contemporary Spanish cuisine. That lineage connects L'Aliança d'Anglès to a broader network of Girona-province cooking that has spent two decades interrogating what Catalan ingredients can become in technically serious hands. Michelin recognised the result with a star in 2024.

Where the Food Comes From — and Why That Is the Whole Point

The sourcing philosophy at L'Aliança d'Anglès is not a decorative statement. In the tradition of the leading Girona-region restaurants, from the three-star benchmark of El Celler de Can Roca to contemporaries across the province, proximity to ingredients has always been an argument about flavour, not marketing. The land around Anglès and the broader Alt Empordà and La Selva comarca supply vegetables, meats, and foraged produce that carry a specific character rooted in Catalan agricultural practice.

What distinguishes Carrera’s approach is the degree of transparency built into service itself. Each course arrives with an explanation of where its ingredients originate. That is not table theatre: it is a pedagogical stance, one that positions the diner as someone who should understand the chain from field to plate. In a region where farming identity is woven into the physical fabric of the building they are eating in, this framing is coherent rather than contrived.

The kitchen’s handling of vegetables has drawn particular attention from observers. The Girona province sits within a dense network of small-scale producers, and the seasonal availability of that network drives what appears on the menu. This is a restaurant where the local agricultural calendar has genuine authority over what gets cooked. Diners coming from cities where menus are fixed months in advance will notice the difference.

Two Menus, One Ritual Opening

The dining format at L'Aliança d'Anglès is tasting-menu only, with two options: the Discovery menu and the Emotion menu. Both begin with what the kitchen calls “vermouth time”, a deliberate nod to the social ritual that the building itself once hosted. In Catalonia, the pre-lunch vermouth hour is a deeply embedded cultural practice, not a cocktail course borrowed from elsewhere. Beginning a tasting menu with it reactivates the building’s original function as a place where a community gathered before eating together.

Discovery menu is structured around a tension the kitchen sustains throughout: courses that respect established Catalan culinary tradition sit alongside dishes where the objective is to innovate. This is not a contradiction. It reflects the same duality visible across the Girona-province scene, where kitchens trained in classical Spanish technique do not abandon that foundation when reaching for contemporary expression. The result is a menu that reads as genuinely bicultural rather than nostalgic on one side and experimental on the other.

Emotion menu moves further into the contemporary register, though specifics of its current composition are not available here. Both menus sit at the €€€€ price tier, placing L'Aliança d'Anglès in the same bracket as comparators such as Arzak in San Sebastián, Disfrutar in Barcelona, and Quique Dacosta in Dénia. The contrast with those addresses is informative: L'Aliança d'Anglès operates at the same price point and with the same Michelin recognition, but in a small inland Catalan town rather than a regional capital, which concentrates the dining experience considerably.

The Girona Province Kitchen Network

To understand what L'Aliança d'Anglès represents, it helps to map it within the constellation of serious restaurants that the Girona province has produced. El Celler de Can Roca is the axis around which much of this network orbits, not only because of its three Michelin stars but because its kitchen has trained a generation of chefs who have dispersed across Catalonia and beyond. Carrera’s years there represent a documented credential that positions L'Aliança d'Anglès within that lineage.

The broader Spanish high-end scene provides a useful comparative frame. The country holds a concentration of technically ambitious restaurants, from Mugaritz in Errenteria and Martin Berasategui in Lasarte-Oria in the Basque Country to Aponiente in El Puerto de Santa María on the Atlantic coast, Azurmendi in Larrabetzu, DiverXO in Madrid, and Ricard Camarena in València. Even in that company, a one-star kitchen in a nineteenth-century farmers’ club in a town the size of Anglès occupies a particular position. The scale is intimate, the location is non-metropolitan, and the historical context of the building adds a layer of meaning that a purpose-built restaurant space cannot replicate. For comparison, internationally operating kitchens in this format tier, such as Frantzén in Stockholm or FZN by Björn Frantzén in Dubai, demonstrate how the small-capacity, high-credential tasting-menu format travels. L'Aliança d'Anglès belongs to that tier by credential, while remaining firmly rooted in a very specific Catalan locality. You can also explore other notable addresses through Atrio in Cáceres for a comparable sense of how heritage buildings anchor fine dining in smaller Spanish cities.

Planning a Visit

The restaurant operates a schedule that reflects its position in a small town rather than a city. Lunch service runs from 1 PM to 3 PM Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Dinner is available Friday and Saturday evenings from 8:30 PM to 10 PM. Wednesday and Thursday are closed. Given that the format is tasting-menu only and the room carries the weight of the building’s history, this is a destination that rewards deliberate planning rather than spontaneous booking. Anglès sits in the Girona province, making it a viable extension of a broader trip to Girona city, the Costa Brava, or the Pyrenean foothills. For those building an itinerary around the area, our full Anglès hotels guide covers accommodation options, and our full Anglès restaurants guide maps the wider dining scene. The town also has options worth knowing about through our full Anglès bars guide, our full Anglès wineries guide, and our full Anglès experiences guide.

€€€€ price positioning means this sits at the leading of the local range and is consistent with what a Michelin-starred tasting menu commands across the province. Booking in advance is advisable; a kitchen of this profile, in a building with limited covers, does not absorb last-minute tables easily on service days.