There is a moment, ascending to the rooftop terrace of the 1910 Casino de Madrid on Calle Alcalá, when the city appears to fall away below you and the business of the world becomes very small. This is by design. Paco Roncero — creative director, two-Michelin-star chef, and one of Spain's most technically accomplished cooks — built his flagship restaurant inside one of Madrid's most architecturally significant buildings, and the setting does serious work before a single dish arrives.
The Casino de Madrid, designed by José López Sallabery and completed in 1910, is a monument to belle époque excess: ornate facades, neoclassical grandeur, a building that signals wealth and permanence in every cornice. Roncero's restaurant occupies the upper floors, with the celebrated summer terrace offering views across the rooflines toward the Puerta del Sol. Inside, the dining room bridges eras — white tablecloths and classical proportions meet the precise, technical cuisine of a chef who studied under Ferran Adrià at elBulli and has spent two decades refining what he learned there.
The menu structure offers three tasting experiences: the Gran Madrid (€310 per person, 25 creations), the Madrid, Madrid, Madrid menu (€240, 23 creations), and the more accessible Esencia menu available Thursday and Friday lunchtimes. All are available with sommelier-led wine pairings. The cooking draws deeply from Spanish pantry — Galician seafood, Iberian pork, La Mancha saffron, Andalusian olive oil — but subjects each ingredient to the full vocabulary of avant-garde technique. Liquid nitrogen, sous vide, spherification: the tools of molecular gastronomy wielded with restraint and purpose, never for spectacle alone.
Signature moments include an extraordinary olive oil tasting — served as its own course, a meditation on terroir — and a sequence of miniature bites that arrive before the main menu and constitute, in themselves, a complete culinary argument. The wine list skews Spanish with intelligence, leaning heavily on the country's less-celebrated wine regions: the volcanic whites of Canary Islands, the oxidative wines of Montilla-Moriles, and an exceptional Sherry selection that Roncero has championed long before Sherry became fashionable again.
