🇪🇸 Spain · Spanish cuisine · b. 1972
The Extremaduran chef who turned a beach restaurant in Dénia into a three-Michelin-star landmark.
Quique Dacosta is a Spanish chef from Jarandilla de la Vera in the rural region of Extremadura who, with no formal culinary training, built a three-Michelin-star restaurant on the beach of Dénia on the Mediterranean coast of Alicante. He took over the kitchen of El Poblet — a small Levantine seafood and rice restaurant — in 1989 at the age of seventeen, became its chef-patron in 1999, and renamed it Quique Dacosta Restaurante in 2009. The first Michelin star arrived in 2002, the second in 2005 and the third in 2012, making it one of only a dozen restaurants in Spain to hold three stars and the only one in the province of Alicante.
Dacosta's cooking is a meditation on the Mediterranean — and specifically on the dry, salt-marsh, rice-paddy landscape of the Marina Alta where the restaurant sits — translated through a sustained, two-decade-long programme of avant-garde technique. He is one of the most important figures of the second wave of Spanish cocina de vanguardia, the generation that emerged after Ferran Adrià but extended the project beyond El Bulli's emulsions and spherifications into a longer engagement with edible landscape, with native flora (almonds, citrus, salicornia, dried red prawns of Dénia) and with the long history of Valencian rice culture. His dish 'Cubalibre de foie' (a foie-gras and Coca-Cola jelly mocktail) and his 'Coca-Cola lacquered Iberian pork' have both passed into the standard repertoire of contemporary Spanish fine dining.
In addition to the flagship in Dénia, Dacosta runs a portfolio of more accessible restaurants — El Poblet in Valencia (two Michelin stars), Llisa Negra in Valencia, Vuelve Carolina in Valencia, and the London restaurant Arros QD on Eastcastle Street, which serves Valencian rice cookery in the centre of the West End. He has held the post of culinary director of the Mandarin Oriental Ritz in Madrid since 2021 and has won, with the flagship, the Michelin Green Star for sustainability and the Repsol Sol distinction four times in succession — the only chef in Spain ever to do so.
Edible landscape. Dacosta has written that the entire point of cooking in Dénia is to put the diner inside the specific landscape of the Marina Alta — the rice paddies of Pego, the almond and citrus groves of the Vall de Gallinera, the salt marshes between Dénia and Calp, the prawn boats of the Dénia harbour — by cooking only with the products of that landscape and arranging them in compositions that evoke its visual and aromatic experience. He has been a public critic of fine-dining menus that import lobster, foie gras, truffle and caviar regardless of where the restaurant sits.
Three Michelin stars (since 2012); Michelin Green Star; Repsol Cuatro Soles.
Two Michelin stars; the urban-Valencia outpost of the Dacosta group.
Live-fire Mediterranean grill restaurant in the centre of Valencia.
Tapas and rice restaurant in central Valencia.
Valencian rice-cookery restaurant in the West End of London; opened 2019.
Two Michelin stars; the gastronomic restaurant of the Mandarin Oriental Ritz Madrid, under Dacosta's culinary direction since 2021.
These recipes from our database reflect the spanish cooking tradition that Quique works in. They are not direct reproductions of Quique's copyrighted recipes, but traditional dishes inspired by the same culinary heritage.
“If I have to import the lobster, then I should not be cooking the lobster. I should be cooking what arrived in the boat this morning, in the harbour I can see from the dining room.”
— Madrid Fusión keynote (2018)
“The Marina Alta is my pantry, my library and my museum. The restaurant is only the room where I am allowed to show you what is in them.”
— Quique Dacosta: Tierra y mar (2014)
At seventeen begins washing dishes at El Poblet, a small seafood restaurant on the beach in Dénia, after moving from Extremadura with his family.
Becomes chef-patron of El Poblet.
El Poblet awarded its first Michelin star.
Awarded second Michelin star; named Chef of the Year at Madrid Fusión.
Renames El Poblet to Quique Dacosta Restaurante; opens a second-generation El Poblet in central Valencia.
Awarded third Michelin star at the flagship — only the eighth restaurant in Spain to hold three stars at that point.
Reaches No. 26 on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list.
Opens Arros QD in London — the first overseas outpost of the group.
Appointed culinary director of the Mandarin Oriental Ritz Madrid; opens Deessa.
Deessa awarded two Michelin stars.
Quique Dacosta Restaurante is in Dénia, a coastal town on the Mediterranean in the province of Alicante on Spain's eastern coast, halfway between Valencia and Alicante city. The restaurant occupies a low whitewashed building on the Las Marinas beach road, about a kilometre north of the old town.
Yes. Dacosta has no formal culinary qualifications. He began washing dishes at El Poblet (the predecessor of the current restaurant) at the age of seventeen, learned to cook on the job, and was named chef-patron a decade later. He is one of the small group of self-taught chefs — alongside Ferran Adrià and Niko Romito — who have reached three Michelin stars in Europe.
The Cubalibre de foie is Dacosta's most famous dish and one of the most-photographed plates of the second wave of Spanish avant-garde cuisine. It is a single bite presented as a long-drink glass: a base of foie-gras emulsion, a clear cola-and-rum jelly, and a slice of dehydrated lime — eaten with a long spoon. It has been on the menu in some form since 2003.
Dacosta is the most prominent chef of his generation working on the modernisation of Valencian rice cookery. The flagship in Dénia serves several rice courses on every tasting menu, El Poblet in Valencia is dedicated to a contemporary reading of the rice canon, and his London restaurant Arros QD ('arròs' is Valencian for 'rice') is built entirely around rice cookery. His 2018 book Arroz is a 600-page survey of Spanish rice technique.
Yes. His only overseas restaurant is Arros QD on Eastcastle Street in Fitzrovia, central London, which opened in 2019 and serves Valencian rice cookery — paellas, fideuàs and arròs a banda — cooked over wood fire in front of guests at the centre of the dining room.
Read more on Wikipedia