DSTAgE, Madrid

The food, service and overall experience was amazing and I can see why it has two Michelin stars. We had the 18 course tasting menu and it was divine, and a lot of fresh seafood, a vegetables and some meat dishes and great recommendations of wine from across Spain to go with it. I highly recommend for a special occasion.

Posiblemente uno de los mejores restaurantes de Madrid con un mas que merecido reconocimiento en la guía michelín con dos o tres estrellas
el servicio es excelente y la cocina es muy innovadora con unos ingredientes siempre de primera calidad

ESPECTACULAR! Los 15 platos eran una cadena de sorpresas y no sabíamos con cual quedarnos. El servicio encantador y el estar viendo cómo cocinaban y emplataban todo, era una gozada. El local es moderno y acogedor. Un lugar donde repetir. Una cena e las que crean biografía.

Una gran esperiencia para repetír sin dudarlo una combinación perfecta en todos los pases de sus platos con una excelente explicación por su personal de sala sin dudarlo unos méritos muy bien merecidos

A misguided attempt at creativity that places experimentation ahead of flavour and experience.

I booked DSTAgE as a fan of Spanish experimental and molecular dining, having enjoyed places like Catalonian restaurant Disfrutar. Surely this 2-starred, much raved about setup in Madrid would deliver similar pleasures. The venue itself was great enough; a trendy, shophouse-esque vibe, with a seating arrangement that suggests it was not going to be a stuffy fine-dining evening but a more semi-casual vibe that wanted you to focus on the food. Unfortunately, that’s where you get the biggest letdown.

It starts off innocently enough, amuse-bouche that included chewy deep-fried squid balls and broth made from fish eyeballs; basically tiny, interesting inventions that hinted at exciting things to come. Except.nothing came. Or rather, each dish that followed remained almost like an extended set of amuse-bouche, all single articles of ideas that focused on giving you something different, but not necessarily memorable, enticing or tasty. A good example is the chorizo and egg dish which was a pretty, Instagram-ready bowl that promised a lot. Until you taste it and discovered it was an extremely normal chorizo, with no outstanding features at all. Only after does the server come to you, proudly declaring this was in fact a vegetarian sausage that had ingeniously fooled you. It was such an anti-climax because the dish left me so wanting, and yet the restaurant was implying I should be grateful to be wowed. Another was described as a rose pepper or something, which was simply a red pepper peel rolled to look like a flower that sat in a pool of reduced sweet-ish sauce. Very pretty, but again, it just wasn’t flavourful and felt so incomplete and simple (like a blank piece of paper simple, not a Mark Rothko simple).

And that was basically it the whole night, a tepid and lacklustre (taste-wise) dinner where you kept waiting for the one-off experiments to end and the real food to begin. But instead you never come close to any crescendo and are just left wondering why you paid so much (€170, and another €75 for wine pairing) to indulge a chef (who wasn’t even present to my knowledge). Perhaps the wine pairing could have elevated the experience more; but while the servers described the wines dutifully, they crucially left out any attempts of explaining why it was paired that way (I am only saying this because not everything paired intuitively after tasting).

I am by no mean a gourmet or any sort of culinary connoisseur. Not even close. I am simply someone that occasionally likes to treat myself to a nice meal. And I get that sometimes, even top restaurants will not hit all the marks as they overly focus on either creativity or flavour instead of both. But a consecutive 2-Michelin starred restaurant? I think it was fair to say that what I got was really disappointing. For diners that rated DSTAgE well, perhaps that’s what they felt okay to pay for, a truly experimental menu that they felt gave them a rare insight into the chef’s thought processes. But in a city like Madrid with so many culinary greats (including simple bistros like Casa Toni - try the sweetbread), this was simply too overpriced an attempt at being a truly Michelin experience.

Buena experiencia y gran sitio, no hay duda. Sin embargo, aunque entienda la situación en la que estamos, creo que ha perdido mucho con respecto a otros años. Entiendo que por el covid ya no puedes pasar por los tres espacios por los que pasabas antes, y lo acepto. Pero es que luego ya en mesa parecía que iban con prisa y que nos querían despachar en 1 hora. A este tipo de sitio voy a relajarme y salimos casi estresados. Por información llegamos a las 20.30 y la hora de cierre de la hostelería era a las 12.00, no había necesidad de ir con tanta prisa. Sintiéndolo mucho, hay sitios donde disfruto más en Madrid, incluyendo su hermano pequeño Dspeak que es espectacular. Así que tardaremos en volver

Mi opinión es que es indudable la gran elaboración de los platos. Pero a parte de sabores intensos a atun, setas …. No le he encontrado algo que me aporte placer en el paladar
Lo siento de todo corazón
Tenia unas expectativas muy altas y me he llevado una gran decepción.
Pero hay gusto para todos

Impresionante la experiencia gastronómica que realiza Diego Guerrero y todo su equipo
Es una súper estrella todo lo que hace!
Volveremos pronto y con ganas de probar lo nuevo

Incomprensible! Pobres productos con una absurda elaboración y presentación. No hay nada que reseñar. Tanto lo salado como lo dulce es paupérrimo. Estrellas incomprensibles.