Brothers Javier and Sergio Torres ventured into a project outside of fine dining with the restaurant Eldelmar, located in an imposing spot at the Gastronomic Balcony of Barcelona. Later, this year they debuted with a large market bar, Parada Torres, at the Santa Caterina Market. And now they are just starting a new project at the most iconic market of all: La Boqueria. “After opening Parada Torres, they told us that a stall was coming up for sale in La Boqueria and we really liked the idea. Chatting away, we got excited,” says Javier Torres, who assures that they have a special bond with it because it is the market where they used to go together with their mentor Josep Lladonosa when they left the Arnadí Cooking School. “We have taken the Bar Central, the one that faces the farmers, on the right as you enter,” he says. Although he cannot reveal too much, they plan to open at the beginning of the year.
Is high-end dining dead?
We contrast with voices from the sector the statements by the chef Bruno Verjus in which he announced that he was closing his restaurant
Barcelona“Haute cuisine is dead. I am closing Table. On December 22nd I will do the last service,” announced the French chef Bruno Verjus by surprise this Tuesday on Instagram. The reason he gave was just as blunt: “I don’t feel comfortable with the fact of excluding people from my table. Because the idea of haute cuisine is to bring people to discover extraordinary food and service. But more and more I felt that I was doing things that belonged to the past. I need to move somewhere else. I want to feed people, but not just a few.” His Parisian restaurant has fourteen years of life and two Michelin stars and in 2024 it reached the third position of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
While the sector was still processing the announcement from Verjus, a few hours later it was a Barcelona restaurant that announced it was closing its doors. Frank Beltri, chef of the Slow & Low restaurant, located on Carrer Comte Borrell and which received its shining star four years ago, will perform its last service on October 17th. “After a long period of reflection, we have decided that Slow & Low will close its doors as a gastronomic restaurant. What I take away from this project is having been able to build our own style, a language for cooking, communicating with our clients, and everything that happens around this restaurant,” affirmed Beltri, who reminded that the other informal establishment they have would continue to operate. “The Slow & Low company will continue at the helm of Bar Canyí, serving traditional tapas, and with new projects that we are about to announce”. Bar Canyí is located a minute's walk from the restaurant, and they serve very well-prepared small plates: crystal prawns, escabeches, brandade, rice dishes... It was an immediate success since it opened in 2024. In 2025, Beltri's partner at Slow & Low, Nicolás de la Vega, left the project, tired of the demands of high-end dining. He has now opened a Mexican street food restaurant called Maíz Maíz, which is on Carrer Vilamarí.
Frank Beltri speaks to ARA and highlights the good health of Bar Canyí. “We have more than 3,000 customers a month,” he says. And he states that it is much easier to defend an establishment with low tickets. “People want to go out for dinner, but they prefer to do it five times with a 24-euro ticket than just once.” He points to a paradigm shift in the economic sense, but not regarding tastes. “I don’t believe people don’t like gastronomic restaurants. They love them and enjoy them, but many people find that they have to choose,” he says. He has a new project in mind that will be “even simpler than Bar Canyí.” While this new idea is brewing, he acknowledges that it was hard for him to make the decision due to his love and dedication to Slow & Low and his team. “It was the restaurant with my vision. It was unique. I didn’t copy anyone, I was simply doing my own cooking. It was hard for me to understand that it was ending,” he explains.
What the critics say
Do these two cases show us that fine dining is dying? Philippe Regol is a retired chef. But once he turned off the stoves, he dedicated his time and resources to visiting very diverse restaurants and writing a very detailed and not at all complacent gastronomic critique on the blog Observación Gastronómica 2. Regol is one of the few people who has a complete and unbiased view of the scene here at home and in France. “My impression is that we have a haute cuisine that it's not that we don't deserve it, it's that we cannot maintain it. With our clientele and current salaries, it is impossible. It is a great pity, because talent is lost. Slow & Low did it very well. In my last visit, less than a year ago, I thought that this restaurant in any country in Europe would have had two stars and not one,” affirms the critic to ARA. If asked about the state of health of fine dining, he says it depends: “The cuisine of the show, of frivolity, of spectacle, of exclusivism, of who has the most expensive menu, of not giving meaning to the things that are cooked... This cuisine for me is indeed dead. But there is another cuisine that I believe makes a lot of sense. That of Ricard Camarena, that of Culler de Pau, or even that of Enigma”.
José Carlos Capel is the gastronomic critic with the most solid track record in Spain and the president of the Madrid Fusión congress. Every year, he looks for which young chefs are presenting new and interesting projects. When Verjus's statement is put to him, he denies it categorically. “Haute cuisine is not dead at all. There is a lot of it and it is very good. What there is, is the total decadence of the alleged haute cuisine, the one that copies the good one,” he says.
Capel has been quite critical of the tasting menu model for a long time. “There are young people without knowledge who try to make long and narrow menus. The symbol offine dining is this stereotype that is in a critical situation. What is not sustainable are creative cuisine restaurants that lack solidity. They may have stars, but people don't go there because they are bored of false creativity”. Capel asserts that there has now been a return to traditional cuisine, that tastes have shifted, and that the traditional cuisine made now is better than that of before thanks to the technical knowledge that haute cuisine has contributed: "It is less greasy and with better cooking. And many restaurants run by young people make reinterpreted traditional cuisine. They are very good". And he concludes: "Receiving a star for some has been a punishment. There are people for whom it generates rejection. I myself feel happy in spoon-dish restaurants, of recognizable cuisine where they don't explain things to me that stun and bore me”.
What the chefs say
Oriol Castro, chef at Disfrutar, does not shy away from the question. “I don't think it's dead by any means, but there are people who are suffering. We shouldn't fool ourselves. There are big restaurants that are not doing so well. It is a complicated situation, everything is changing, prices are rising... But gastronomy is very much alive. You only need to look at the high level of restaurants in Barcelona and Catalonia,” he states. For the chef from Sitges, it is easy to make this statement, as his restaurant was considered the best in the world and he has the perspective of having been the head chef of El Bulli at the moment of its maximum global recognition.
Javier Torres, chef of Cocina Hermanos Torres, does not buy the statement either, as he considers that his three-starred restaurant is in its best moment: “It is more alive than ever. It works and it is a good business. We started eight years ago, and this one is proving to be the best of all. It is just the opposite. But now everything is linked to doing things very well, having talent and wanting to do it better every day and having the client return.” In fact, recurrence is a key issue in these restaurants, for the diner to want to repeat instead of considering it seen. “People like eating well more and more, they have more criteria, they know more, they know where they are going. At our place, many people, when they head for the exit, stop and book a table for another day,” explains Torres.