In a century-old house hidden at the foot of Tibidabo hill, surrounded by a garden and contemporary art, Jordi Cruz — the youngest Michelin-starred chef in Spanish history — serves twenty courses of Catalan cooking that begins in the kitchen itself and ends as a statement about what the tradition can become.

First, The Orientation


Barcelona is one of the world's great food cities — and ABaC is the restaurant it took longest to recognize.


Barcelona is, by any measure, one of the most food-obsessed cities in the world. The shadow of El Bulli — the restaurant that Ferran Adrià ran at Cala Montjoi, ninety minutes north of the city, until its closure in 2011 — falls across the entire Catalan fine dining landscape in ways that are still being felt: the explosion of technical ambition, the willingness to rethink what a dish can be, the culture of avant-garde cooking that made Catalonia, briefly, the most discussed culinary region on earth. Barcelona was the city where chefs trained before and after El Bulli, where the movement found its urban expression, where the restaurants that followed in the tradition established the culture of serious eating that the city now takes for granted.


Into this context, in 2010, a thirty-two-year-old Catalan chef from Manresa arrived at a boutique hotel at the foot of Tibidabo hill and set about building something that the city had been waiting for without quite knowing it. ABaC had been a serious restaurant before Jordi Cruz arrived — it held two Michelin stars under Xavier Pellicer — but the version that Cruz built from 2010 was something different: a cooking of sustained, restless originality that drew from the Catalan tradition, from the Mediterranean, from Japan, from anywhere the intelligence of the cuisine required, and expressed all of it within the framework of a tasting menu that the restaurant describes as twenty small stories about life, water, nature, and roots.


Two stars came back in 2012. The third arrived in 2017, making Cruz — who had already become the most recognisable chef in Spain through his decade-long presence as a judge on MasterChef Spain — the holder of the most Michelin stars in Barcelona at a single address. By 2024 the city had four three-star restaurants: ABaC, Disfrutar, Lasarte, and Cocina Hermanos Torres. The transformation of Barcelona into one of the world's most concentrated three-star environments had taken twenty years from El Bulli's closing. ABaC was the first address in the city to reach the highest level and the one that made three stars seem possible for the restaurants that followed.

The Chef


Manresa. Seven years old, a pot of beans, and a mother who was right.  The formation of the youngest starred chef in Spain.


Jordi Cruz was born on 29 June 1978 in Manresa, a market city in the Bages comarca north of Barcelona, in a Catalan family with no connection to the restaurant industry. The origin story he tells is specific and often repeated because it is true: he was seven years old, his mother was ill, and he prepared a dish of beans with potatoes — mongetes amb patates, the simplest, most domestic of Catalan preparations — and brought it to her. She tasted it and told him he would be a chef. He has said, decades later: only now was she right.


He enrolled at the Escola Superior d'Hostaleria Joviat in Manresa while still in his early teens. At fourteen he began working at Estany Clar in Cercs, a restaurant in a mountain village an hour north of Barcelona, initially as a server. By eighteen he was head chef. By twenty-four — in November 2004, depending on which source one uses; some give 2002 — he received the Michelin star that made him the youngest chef in Spanish history and the second youngest in Europe to hold the distinction. He did not come from a restaurant family. He did not train in famous kitchens in France or Spain. He arrived at Michelin-starred cooking by the most Catalan possible route: by being born curious and stubborn, starting work at fourteen in a mountain village, and outpacing everyone around him without apparently noticing.


"My cuisine is a restlessly evolving expression based on different products, creativity and tradition. I believe in technique that is invisible — what the guest should feel is the emotion of the dish, not the skill behind it."

JORDI CRUZ, CHEF AND OWNER, ABAC


Before reaching ABaC, Cruz accumulated a competitive record that established him not just as a talented cook but as the most decorated young chef in Spain: the Spanish Championship for Young Chefs in San Sebastián in 2002; the International Prize for Cooking with Olive Oil in 2003; the Championship of Spain Award for Young Values in Marbella in 2003; the first edition of Chef of the Year in 2006, an event of which he later became vice president of the jury, chaired by Martín Berasategui. In December 2007 he moved to L'Angle at Món Sant Benet, an eleventh-century monastery complex outside Barcelona, which earned its Michelin star within a year of his arrival. In May 2010, the González Simó family, owners of the ABaC Hotel, offered him the position of head chef at their boutique hotel on the Tibidabo road. He took it, and has been there since.


The MasterChef Spain role — Cruz has been on the jury since 2013, the show's first season on TVE1 — brought him a public visibility that very few chefs of his quality possess anywhere in the world. He is, by some distance, the most recognised chef's face in Spain: a position that would concern certain colleagues worried about the distraction it creates, but which Cruz has maintained in parallel with a kitchen that, at its best, represents the most personal and complete expression of his cooking available anywhere.

The Formation


From a mountain village to three stars — the path of a chef who trained himself before anyone else trained him.


Cruz's formation is unusual in that its most important phase — the decade at Estany Clar in Cercs, from fourteen to twenty-four, from server to head chef to Michelin-starred cook — happened entirely within one restaurant, and that restaurant was not a famous one. He did not pass through the great European kitchens. He did not stage under the three-star generation. He developed a cuisine of technical originality in relative isolation, in a rural village in the Catalan mountains, and the rest of his career has been the elaboration of what he discovered there.


  • (Manresa) Catalan family kitchen and Escola Joviat — the earliest formation — The beans and potatoes that Cruz cooked for his ill mother at seven are the starting point of every version of his professional biography, and they are not decorative mythology. They represent a specific culinary instinct — an understanding of food as care and as pleasure at the same moment — that runs through the cooking at ABaC, which is simultaneously technically extraordinary and emotionally direct. The school at Manresa, Escola Superior d'Hostaleria Joviat, produced multiple Michelin-starred chefs and gave Cruz the formal foundation on which everything else was built.


  • (Cercs, Catalunya) Estany Clar — ten years, server to head chef to Michelin star — The decade at Estany Clar is the formation that no standard narrative about the importance of staging in famous kitchens can fully account for. Cruz began as a server at fourteen, took over the kitchen at eighteen, and earned a Michelin star at twenty-four. He did this without the French Laundry, without El Celler de Can Roca, without the great European three-star apprenticeship. He did it by cooking, every day, in a mountain village in Catalonia, and developing a culinary intelligence of sufficient depth that the star arrived as a confirmation rather than a surprise. This is the formation that produced everything else.


  • (Competition Circuit) Young chef competitions — the competitive pressure that sharpens technique — The sequence of championships Cruz won between 2002 and 2006 — Young Chefs in San Sebastián, Olive Oil Cuisine in San Sebastián, Young Values in Marbella, Chef of the Year — was not merely a list of prizes. Each competition required specific preparations under observed pressure, against the best young chefs in Spain, evaluated by judges who included figures like Berasategui. The competitive exposure gave Cruz a relationship with the national fine dining standard and with the Spanish culinary critical apparatus that later became the scaffolding of his career.


  • (Món Sant Benet) L'Angle — head chef, one Michelin star in one year — The move to L'Angle at Món Sant Benet in 2007 was the first test of whether the Estany Clar star was specific to its context or transferable to a different kitchen. It was transferable: the star arrived within twelve months of Cruz's arrival, confirming that the cooking was his rather than the restaurant's. The L'Angle experience also gave him his first major Barcelona-area restaurant — Món Sant Benet is near Manresa, between the city and the mountains — and the operational confidence that came from building a second successful kitchen from scratch.


  • (Barcelona) ABaC from 2010 — two stars in two years, three in seven — The defining posting. Cruz arrived at ABaC inheriting a two-star reputation and rebuilt the kitchen's identity around his own culinary philosophy. Two stars by 2012, three by 2017, the most complete expression of his cooking by the time the third star arrived. The timeline from taking over to three stars — seven years — is fast by any European standard, and it represents the most concentrated phase of creative development in his career. The ABaC that guests eat in today is the product of fifteen years of uninterrupted refinement in a single kitchen.
The setting


A century-old house hidden above the city, a garden with art, and a meal that begins in the kitchen itself.


ABaC occupies a building that functions simultaneously as a boutique hotel and as a destination restaurant, at the point where the city ends and the Tibidabo hill begins. The address — Avinguda del Tibidabo 1 — is literally the first number on the road that leads up to the amusement park and the Sagrat Cor church at the summit, which means it sits at the specific threshold between urban Barcelona and the wooded hillside above it. The building is a century-old house, set back from the road, surrounded by a garden that contains works of contemporary art among its plantings. The hotel has eight rooms and suites; the restaurant can seat up to fifty-six diners.


The Michelin Guide's description of the ABaC experience establishes its structure precisely: the experience begins with appetisers in the kitchen. This is the ritual that marks the meal's opening: guests are brought into the kitchen itself, where the chefs present the first preparations, and the connection between the people who made the food and the people who are about to eat it is established at the meal's very first moment. From the kitchen, the experience moves to the dining room — described by the restaurant as a caprice of whites in all tones, a minimalist space of calm whites and neutral surfaces and large windows that frame the garden. The garden with its contemporary sculptures is visible throughout the meal; in fair weather the terrace and a pavilion connecting the interior and exterior are available.


The sensibility of the space is the sensibility of the cooking: not austere, but precise. Not theatrical, but considered. The works of art in the garden — the sculptures visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows — establish the aesthetic register before anything has been eaten: this is a place where art is a natural presence alongside food, not a decorative addition to it. The combination of the hidden garden, the white dining room, and the contemporary art gives ABaC the quality of a private house whose owner has very good taste — which, in the case of the González Simó family who own the hotel and invited Cruz to cook here, is precisely what it is.

The Food


Twenty stories — the dishes, the philosophy, and the Catalan tradition made new.



The tasting menu at ABaC is described by the restaurant as twenty small stories about life, water, nature, and roots. This is not marketing language but a reasonably precise description of what arrives: a sequence of preparations in which each course has a conceptual identity — a specific idea about an ingredient, a memory, a cultural reference, a technique made visible — that is inseparable from its flavour. The courses are not merely excellent versions of existing dishes. Each one is making an argument about what Catalan cooking can be, or what Mediterranean ingredients can do, or how the tradition of a specific place can be transformed by technique without being abandoned by it.


The Michelin Guide describes Cruz's approach with exactitude: "he revisits Mediterranean flavours with a nod to influences from elsewhere around the globe." The global influences — Japanese umami thinking, the acidity structures of Nordic cooking, the fermentation philosophy that has become central to serious cooking internationally — are not decorative additions to a Catalan base. They are the tools with which the Catalan base is interrogated, extended, and returned with a depth it could not achieve through the tradition alone. The dishes are always recognisably rooted in the Mediterranean; the techniques that produced them may be from anywhere.


The menu evolves continuously with the seasons and with Cruz's ongoing creative development. Signature dishes recur across versions of the menu because they are genuinely irreplaceable — the preparations that have become so much themselves that removing them would be to diminish the restaurant's identity rather than refresh it. New recipes appear alongside them, the menu changing as the kitchen's research produces something that merits inclusion.


Michelin-Cited Signature — Tribute Le Petit Prince — Crema Catalana with Nitro Popcorn and Caramel


The Michelin Guide names this dish specifically: a tribute to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince, presented as a half-sphere of Crema Catalana with nitrogen-frozen creamy popcorn, burnt caramel ice cream, and rice water. The reference — to a story about the essential things that are invisible to the eye, about the importance of what you cannot see — is typically Cruz: a literary and emotional frame for a preparation that is technically sophisticated and flavourfully direct. Crema Catalana is the most quintessentially Catalan dessert; the preparation honours the tradition and transforms it simultaneously.


Signature Preparation — Smoked Steak Tartare with Beef Snow, Mustard Veil, Crispy Pepper Bread


The tartare that has recurred on ABaC's menus as one of Cruz's most enduring statements about texture and temperature: raw beef, seasoned and arranged, alongside beef snow — a frozen preparation of beef that arrives cold and dissolves — a mustard veil that contributes acid and structure, and crispy pepper bread for crunch. The dish is simultaneously a classical preparation and a completely contemporary one: recognisable in all its components, unfamiliar in how they relate to each other. The smoked element provides the depth that connects the cold and room-temperature components.


Mediterranean Signature — Mediterranean Tuna Ventresca with Ponzu Macaroni and Artichoke


The dish that most directly demonstrates Cruz's use of Japanese technique within a Mediterranean framework: ventresca — the fatty belly of bluefin tuna, the most prized cut in the Spanish tradition — alongside ponzu-marinated macaroni, kumquat skin, mizuna, crispy artichoke, and spicy roots purée. The ponzu is Japanese in origin and entirely compatible with the tuna's fatty richness in the way it manages acid. The artichoke is the most Catalan vegetable in the kitchen. The combination is neither Japanese nor Catalan but specifically ABaC: the product of a chef who uses whatever his dishes require.


Catalon Produce — Carabinero Prawn — Deep Red, Sea-Sweet, Intensely Umami


The carabinero — the scarlet giant prawn of the Mediterranean and Atlantic depths, whose intense red colour and deep oceanic flavour make it the most dramatic shellfish in Spanish cooking — appears in ABaC's menu in preparations that honour its sheer flavour intensity without domesticating it. Cruz's handling of the carabinero exemplifies the kitchen's approach to premium Catalan ingredients: no technique that obscures, only techniques that reveal. The head, where the most concentrated flavour is located, is always the most important part of the preparation.


Conceptual Course — The Kitchen Course — Appetizers Presented by the Chefs Themselves


The opening of the ABaC experience — before the dining room, before the first formal course — happens in the kitchen, where the chefs present the opening preparations directly. This is not a kitchen tour or a viewing window: it is the first act of the meal, in which the guest's relationship with the cooking is established as a direct one rather than a mediated one. The specific preparations vary; the gesture is constant. Cruz describes the meal as twenty stories; the kitchen course is the prologue, the moment before the narrative begins, in which the storyteller introduces themselves.


The Philosophy — Technique Invisible — Emotion Visible


The governing principle of ABaC's cooking is stated by Cruz with a consistency that suggests a genuine conviction rather than a curated interview position: what the guest should feel is the emotion of the dish, not the skill behind it. This is the opposite of the approach associated with certain strands of avant-garde cooking, in which the technique is the point and the spectacle of its execution is what the diner is meant to admire. At ABaC, the nitrogen and the veil and the snow are present because they make the dish taste better and feel more itself. They are not visible. The flavour is.

Catalonia and Its Cooking


The tradition that ABaC is transforming — and why the Catalan kitchen is the right place to do it.


Catalan cuisine is one of the most technically sophisticated and historically deep regional culinary traditions in Europe — a fact that the shadow of French gastronomy and the more recent shadow of El Bulli have both, in different ways, obscured. The classical Catalan repertoire: the sofregit (the long-cooked tomato-onion base that underpins dozens of preparations), the picada (the almond-based thickener that is perhaps the most specifically Catalan technique in the canon), the romesco sauce of the Tarragona coast, the relationship between the sea and the mountains that produces the signature Catalan combination of meat and shellfish (mar i muntanya) — these are the foundations on which every serious Catalan chef builds, and on which Cruz builds at ABaC.


The specific Catalan tradition that Cruz most directly honours is not the haute cuisine tradition — the classical Catalan restaurant that echoes French models — but the domestic one: the cooking of the Catalan home, of grandmother's kitchen in Manresa, of the beans and potatoes that a seven-year-old prepared for a sick mother. His cooking is sophisticated; its emotional register is domestic. This is the combination that makes ABaC specifically Catalan rather than specifically post-El Bulli: not the rejection of technique but the insistence that technique is always in service of flavour and warmth rather than of spectacle.


Barcelona is, in 2025, one of the most genuinely exciting restaurant cities in the world, with four three-star restaurants and a depth of serious one- and two-star cooking that rivals any city outside Paris and Tokyo. The broader Catalan region — Disfrutar's founders trained at El Bulli; El Celler de Can Roca is an hour north in Girona — constitutes a culinary landscape of extraordinary density. ABaC's position at the head of this landscape is not merely historical. It reflects the ongoing quality of Cruz's kitchen, the continuous evolution of a menu that he has described as restlessly developing, and the specific combination of emotional directness and technical ambition that makes this restaurant's cooking unlike any other in the city.

Before You arrive



Everything practical, plainly told


  • Address: Avinguda del Tibidabo 1, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, 08022 Barcelona. The restaurant is at the base of Avinguda del Tibidabo — literally the first building on the road that leads up to Tibidabo hill — set back from the street behind a garden. The ABaC Hotel signage is on the gate. The neighbourhood is Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, an upper-residential district above the Eixample, approximately 3.5 kilometres from Plaça de Catalunya.


  • Getting There: By taxi or rideshare: approximately 15–20 minutes from central Barcelona (Eixample, Gothic Quarter, Barceloneta), depending on traffic; approximately 20–30 minutes from the airport. The restaurant is at the junction of Avinguda del Tibidabo and Avinguda de Pedralbes; give the driver "Avinguda Tibidabo 1, ABaC Hotel." By Metro and Tram: FGC train from Plaça de Catalunya to Avinguda del Tibidabo station (L6/S1/S2 lines, approximately 10 minutes), then Tramvia Blau or a 10-minute walk along the avenue. By FGC alone: the restaurant is approximately 8 minutes' walk from the station along Avinguda del Tibidabo (downhill on the return).


  • Reservations: Essential, and typically several weeks to two months in advance for dinner. Reservations through the ABaC website (abacrestaurant.com) or by phone at +34 933 19 66 00. Dietary requirements must be communicated at booking. The restaurant is flexible with serious restrictions given advance notice; the menu cannot be meaningfully adjusted for restrictions communicated on the day. Hotel guests who book two consecutive nights can access both the full tasting menu and the shorter hotel menu across the two evenings — a practical option for those who want two different experiences of the kitchen.


  • Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday: lunch seatings from 13:00, dinner from 20:00. Sunday service also available at the same times. Confirm current holiday and seasonal closures when booking. The restaurant operates a single seating per service; the tasting menu takes approximately three to four hours.


  • The Menu: A single tasting menu of approximately twenty courses, priced at €295 per person (2024 pricing; confirm at booking). The wine pairing is approximately €140 additional per person. A shorter hotel menu is available to overnight guests. The restaurant's self-description — "twenty small stories about life, water, nature and roots" — accurately reflects the menu's structure: each preparation has a conceptual identity alongside its flavour, and the progression is more dramatic arc than simple sequence of courses.


  • Staying Overnight: The ABaC Hotel has eight rooms and suites in the historic house. The rooms are boutique in scale and well-appointed; the hotel operates as a restaurant-with-rooms rather than a full-service hotel, with breakfast included and spa access. The primary advantage of staying is proximity — no transport logistics before or after dinner, and the possibility of experiencing the garden at night and in the morning. The hotel is a genuine option for visitors whose primary purpose is the restaurant. A gourmet breakfast is included for hotel guests.


  • What to Wear: Smart casual is the standard. The restaurant's aesthetic — white minimalism, contemporary art in the garden, designer-styled service staff — suggests something similar in dress: polished without being formal. Barcelona's fine dining culture is somewhat less formal than Madrid's or the French tradition; business casual to smart casual is always appropriate. The meal begins in the kitchen before moving to the dining room, which means comfortable footwear is worth considering.


  • The Broader ABaC: Cruz operates three other restaurants in Barcelona through ABaC Group: Angle Barcelona, which holds two Michelin stars and is located in the central Eixample; Ten's Tapas, the casual tapas restaurant in El Born; and the Angle Barcelona operation. For visitors spending several days in Barcelona, a meal at Angle offers the second-most complete expression of Cruz's cooking at a different price point and in a city-centre setting.
Things Worth KNowing Before You Go



The notes that belong in no other section


  • The kitchen course is the meal's first act — treat it with full attention — The experience at ABaC begins not at the table but in the kitchen, where the chefs present the opening preparations directly. This is not a tour of the kitchen as a preamble to dining; it is the first act of the meal proper, in which the relationship between the people who made the food and the people who are about to eat it is established directly rather than through a service layer. The kitchen is approximately two hundred square metres, designed by Joaquim Casademont; the equipment is serious and the brigade working around the guests during the presentation is fully engaged in service. Give this stage the same attention you would give the dining room. It sets the tone for everything that follows. 



  • Understand the literary and conceptual dimension of the menu — it matters for the meal's meaning —
ABaC's menu is described as twenty stories, and individual dishes have specific conceptual identities: the tribute to Le Petit Prince with its invisible-things philosophy, preparations that reference specific Catalan memories or landscapes, courses that are making arguments about what Mediterranean ingredients can do when approached without inhibition. These frames are not pretentious additions to good food; they are the level at which the food is operating. Reading the Saint-Exupéry reference before arriving — understanding why Cruz chose a story about the essential things being invisible to the eye as the frame for a Crema Catalana — is the difference between eating a technically impressive dessert and understanding what it means. 



  • Allow time in the garden before and after dinner — it is one of the best outdoor spaces in Barcelona's fine dining scene — The garden at ABaC contains works of contemporary art among its plantings, and the combination of garden, sculpture, and the century-old house creates an environment that is quite unlike any other fine dining setting in Barcelona. In fair weather — the majority of the year in this climate — the pavilion connecting the interior and exterior is open, and the garden terrace is available for aperitifs before the meal and digestifs after it. Arriving fifteen to twenty minutes before your reservation time, when the evening light is on the garden, is worth planning for. 



  • Eat Catalan food in the city before dinner — it illuminates what ABaC is transforming — The cooking at ABaC is in direct conversation with the Catalan culinary tradition at every level: the sofregit, the picada, the romesco, the mar i muntanya combinations, the specific Catalan way of treating fish and shellfish from the Mediterranean coast. Having eaten these preparations in their traditional and everyday forms — at a neighbourhood bodega in Sarrià, at the Mercat de Santa Caterina in the Born, at La Barceloneta's fish restaurants — before sitting down at ABaC deepens the meal's meaning substantially. Cruz's cooking is most fully itself when understood as the transformation of something specific, not as the creation of something entirely new.


  • The location is a genuine feature, not a limitation — approach it as the Tibidabo neighbourhood deserves — ABaC is approximately thirty minutes from central Barcelona by taxi, in a neighbourhood — Sarrià-Sant Gervasi — that most tourists do not visit. This is, from the perspective of the meal, an advantage rather than an inconvenience: the restaurant is genuinely set apart from the city, in a quiet residential neighbourhood above the urban density, in a house with a garden where the sounds of traffic are not present. Arriving from Tibidabo's FGC station on foot, down the avenue past the old trams, is the right approach to a building that rewards the transition from city to garden. Build the journey into the evening rather than treating it as time lost. 



  • Ask about the seasonal and current menu when booking — ABaC's menu evolves genuinely and continuously —
Unlike some tasting menus that are updated seasonally on a fixed cycle, Cruz's menu at ABaC is described as restlessly evolving — changing as new dishes are developed, as seasonal ingredients shift, as the kitchen's ongoing research produces something worth incorporating. The menu you eat in October will differ meaningfully from the one eaten in March. Asking what the current seasonal focus is, which new preparations have recently joined the menu, and which signature dishes are present at the time of your visit — this is a conversation the restaurant team is equipped and enthusiastic to have, and it prepares you better for what you will experience.


  • Book Angle Barcelona separately — it offers the most complete second expression of Cruz's cooking available in the city —
Angle Barcelona, Cruz's two-Michelin-starred restaurant in the Eixample, is the most direct alternative to ABaC for guests who want a second encounter with his cooking at a different register. Located in the Eixample's Hotel Cram, Angle operates a tasting menu at a meaningfully lower price point than ABaC — approximately €130–150 per person — with the same philosophical roots and the same attention to Catalan seasonal ingredients, but in a more central and accessible setting. A meal at ABaC and a subsequent lunch at Angle constitutes the most complete available picture of Cruz's culinary thinking. Both are worth planning. 



  • ABaC sits at the head of Barcelona's three-star constellation — experience it as such, not as one of four equivalent options —
Barcelona now has four three-Michelin-starred restaurants, each with a distinct identity: ABaC's Catalan tradition transformed by Cruz's restless originality; Disfrutar's avant-garde precision from the El Bulli lineage; Lasarte's Berasategui-school Basque rigour; Cocina Hermanos Torres's market-driven Catalan abundance. None of these restaurants is a substitute for the others. ABaC is specifically worth experiencing as the restaurant that established three-star cooking in the city — the address that arrived at the highest level first, in 2017, and that has maintained it through a period in which the competition has intensified to the point where each of the four three-stars is genuinely distinct. Come specifically for what ABaC is rather than for what the three-star category means.
Why This Restaurant


What ABaC actually is


The specific achievement of ABaC is not simply that it holds three Michelin stars in a city that now has several three-star restaurants. It is that the cooking there belongs entirely and unmistakably to Jordi Cruz in a way that makes the restaurant inseparable from its chef — and that this inseparability is the product of fifteen years of uninterrupted creative development in the same kitchen, by a chef who had already demonstrated at twenty-four that he was capable of working at this level.


Cruz is simultaneously the most publicly visible chef in Spain — the MasterChef judge whose face is known to millions of Spanish households — and a genuine creative force whose cooking at ABaC is the opposite of the celebrity kitchen: personal, evolving, emotionally direct, and technically serious without ever being self-congratulatory. The tension between the public persona and the private creative practice is resolved, at ABaC, entirely in favour of the food. The television career has not simplified the restaurant's cooking. If anything, the contrast makes the restaurant more itself: the place where Jordi Cruz is not performing for an audience of millions but thinking, as carefully as he has been thinking since he was fourteen years old in a mountain village in Catalonia, about what food can mean.


Tradition, cutting-edge, flavour, attitude and passion, along with a consistent approach, define to perfection the cooking of Jordi Cruz. He offers diners a unique gastronomic experience that constantly evolves in line with ingredients from the changing seasons, combined with his technical ability as he revisits Mediterranean flavours with a nod to influences from elsewhere around the globe.

MICHELIN GUIDE INSPECTORS, ON ABAC


At seven years old, in a kitchen in Manresa, he cooked beans and potatoes for a sick mother and was told he would be a chef. At fourteen he started work as a server in Cercs. At eighteen he was head chef. At twenty-four, Spain's youngest Michelin-starred cook. At forty-six, running three restaurants and four Michelin stars in Barcelona, the most recognised chef face in the country, and still cooking — still, in the kitchen at Tibidabo 1, making things that have not existed before. The twenty stories on the menu change with the seasons and with the kitchen's ongoing research. The story of the chef does not change. It is the same story it has always been: a Catalan from Manresa who wanted to cook, and cooked until the world noticed.