Diverxo

DiverXO is the tasting-menu restaurant of the Madrid chef David Muñoz, known as Dabiz, in the NH Eurobuilding hotel in the Chamartín district. Its cooking mixes modern Spanish technique with the flavors of Asia and an open taste for provocation.

Muñoz was born in Madrid and worked in London at Hakkasan and Nobu before he returned home and opened DiverXO in a small room in the Tetuán neighborhood. The restaurant moved to the hotel in Chamartín in the middle of the 2010s, into a much larger space. He is easy to spot in his own dining room, with a mohawk and piercings, and the restaurant carries the same mood of punk and abstract art in its decor, with flying pigs and giant butterflies above the tables.

The menu is a long run of small dishes, many of them painted onto large canvases at the table by the waiters, who finish the sauces in front of the guests. Earlier menus served crisp pork skin on a brioche of black sesame, topped with salmon roe in a cherry sauce, and monkfish hidden under thin colored shards of potato. Suckling pig has come with dim sum filled with steamed carrot and a noodle soup made from oxtail, a dish that sums up his mix of Madrid and Asia.

The Michelin Guide gave DiverXO three stars in 2013, making Muñoz one of the youngest chefs to hold them, and the restaurant has kept them since. It has appeared on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for years, and The Best Chef Awards named Muñoz the best chef in the world several times. He also runs StreetXO, a casual bar of Asian street food, and RavioXO, a restaurant of dumplings and filled pasta, both in Madrid.