Ask Dabiz Muñoz about the first time he actually felt drawn to the kitchen, and he’ll say, “It happened at Viridiana.” A restaurant in Madrid run by Chef Abraham García, where his father often took him as a child.
In fact, he told his father, at this same place, that he intended to be the best chef in the world.
His father, being a practical man, told him that pigs would sooner fly. Of course, it is not a coincidence that flying pigs now cover the walls at DiverXO, line the staircase, and give the restaurant’s only tasting menu its name.
After culinary school in Madrid, Muñoz spent his formative years in London working in the kitchens of Nobu and Hakkasan. When he returned to Madrid and opened DiverXO in 2007, it was from a tiny space on Calle Pensamiento, with almost no resources and a waiting list from day one.
Then came Michelin stars back-to-back: one in 2010, two in 2012, three in 2013.
Muñoz was 33 years old when he earned the third, making him the second youngest chef in history to reach that milestone.
“This recognition is historic in terms of the conditions in which it was given. It shows that great things can be achieved with little resources,” he shares.
The restaurant has since moved twice. It currently operates from the NH Collection Eurobuilding in Madrid’s Chamartín district.
A third move is already underway, with Muñoz confirming in late 2025 that DiverXO will relocate again within the next 1.5 years. When asked what would carry over from the current space, he answered:
“The DNA may persevere, but we are going to redefine 100% what DiverXO is. What moves me right now is to keep breaking the rules and try to continue being avant-garde, opening new doors.”
The Experience Itself
DiverXO, as Muñoz himself describes it, is a way of understanding life. The leitmotif, he says, is surprise, fun, and intensity. You experience all three of those things right the moment you walk in.
The first things you notice are the flying pigs on the walls and the giant metal ants near the staircase. The pigs, of course, reference the childhood story about his father. The ants, on the other hand, represent teamwork. Because what happens in that room every night requires the entire team to run at full capacity.
The dining room boasts round white marble tables at the centre with intimate private corners around the edges. White linen curtains can be drawn around each table, creating a cocooned atmosphere without entirely cutting you off from the energy of the room.
You sit in armchairs, which are luxuriously upholstered, each with a pair of angel wings embroidered on the back. Even the bathrooms, pink and carefully considered, feel like part of the experience itself.
Staff wear simple uniforms and Nike shoes. At various points during the meal, chefs from the kitchen will appear at your table to add a final element to a dish or simply explain what is about to happen. The line between the kitchen and the dining room is deliberately porous.
There is only one menu. There has only ever been one menu.
The Flying Pigs Cuisine tasting menu moves through approximately 25 courses, each presented with either a detailed picture or a written description so the diner can follow along. The pictures are works of art in their own right.
Before each dish arrives, the card is presented, giving the table time to read, discuss, and anticipate. It’s merely a small thing, but it controls the pacing.
Each dish engages every sense with intent. The visual presentation first strikes in colour and form. The aromas then follow.
Some dishes here are eaten with fingers, others with cutlery designed to be as beautiful as what it carries.
The Food: Personal, Hedonistic, and Utterly Unrepeatable
The only way to really describe what Dabiz Muñoz cooks is to describe specific dishes. Abstractions fall short.
For example, there is a menu that has ‘Galician lobster waking up on the beaches of Goa.’ And ‘Drunken crabs partying in Jerez.’
There is also a miniature pork sandwich called the Minutejo del Agus, which is inspired by the snacks his father used to make for him as a child. Though now he adds to it a suckling pig, pecorino, homemade sriracha, and forest-inspired pesto.
Muñoz draws on Eastern cooking, Nordic influences, Spanish tradition, and Asian presentation without letting any single thread take over.
Around 65 to 70 percent of the ingredients used are Spanish, which gives the food its grounding.
The menu also reflects Muñoz’s interest in environmental themes. The blue crab, an invasive species in Spain, is part of the menu served in a traditional Chinese style with kimchi ice cream and wild strawberries. The reason, as explained by the team, is that DiverXO helps eradicate it.
One reviewer mentioned, “Each dish was so complex, had so much meaning, that I felt like I was only touching the surface of each dish. You know when you are experiencing it for the first time that it’s a great restaurant, and I think if you’re lucky enough to go a few times, the experience will only elevate and grow with each passing visit.”
The Wine
The wine program at DiverXO is led by Miguel Ángel Millán, who was named the world’s best sommelier at the 2023 World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. He has now been at DiverXO for five years.
He says, “The bottles selected for DiverXO’s pairings are, in many cases, unique for various reasons (vintage, highly sought-after producers, etc.). Additionally, I seek harmony not only organoleptically based on flavors and aromas, but also that the wine has a beautiful story that continues the story the chef conveys on the plate.”
He describes it as full of unique and irreplaceable bottles, constantly evolving, alive. When asked whether a classic Gran Reserva Rioja has any place alongside cuisine this progressive, he says anyone who thinks it doesn’t is missing out on a great wine from the world. Nothing is excluded in principle. Everything has to earn its place.
Millán also emphasises the speed at which service moves at DiverXO. Great planning is essential, he says, and so is the ability to improvise. The two things are not in tension. They are the same discipline in different registers.
The Man Behind It, and Why It Matters
Dabiz Muñoz is currently ranked fourth in the world. He has been named the world’s best chef three times by The Best Chef Awards. He runs Madrid’s only three-Michelin-starred restaurant.
He is also, by his own account, a person who spent years earning 1,000 euros a month while running a restaurant with 30 staff serving 30 covers a night. “A restaurant like DiverXO is not in itself a business, but based on that, we have to build a business that allows us to be profitable overall.”
That honesty is part of what the brand is. Muñoz has never pretended that DiverXO is a conventional enterprise or that his choices are commercially rational. He is committed to a set of ideals, and the restaurant is the physical expression of those ideals.
Take his punk aesthetic, the mohawk, and the piercings. They have consistently remained part of what makes him who he is.
He has said, on the record, that the day he is no longer at the forefront is the day he will close DiverXO. He says, “The motivation to continue with DiverXO is to continue redefining the rules, to continue being super creative. To redefine what a haute cuisine restaurant with three Michelin stars is.”
Vanguard or Die
That phrase, ‘Vanguard or Die,’ is the operating principle of DiverXO. After all, the restaurant is difficult to get into, expensive to experience, and almost impossible to fully absorb on a single visit. It is also, for those who have been lucky enough to sit there, something they do not forget.
But it is where it is at a cost. For a long time, Dabiz Muñoz “slept five hours a day, worked 18 hours a day, ate whatever I wanted, and nothing happened to me. I thought I was immortal.” Then he turned 42, and finally began to understand that the most important frontier had nothing to do with the food on the plate.
“Probably for many years, I have loved myself little with things that I have done to myself in my head, and that has resulted in a few years in which my relationship with the restaurant has not been the best,” he says.
What he describes is a pattern that’s very common in the hospitality industry. The idea that grinding is a virtue, that suffering is proof of commitment, that the number of hours put in is a measure of how much you care.
Today, sport sits at the centre of his daily routine. Whatever I do, wherever I am in the world, he has said, the number one priority on his agenda is to do sport. He arrives at DiverXO every day thinking about what he is going to change, what he is going to make better. The relentlessness is still there. But now it shares the schedule with sustainability.
There is something worth paying attention to in all of this, particularly for anyone working in or around the hospitality industry. The person who built one of the most demanding creative environments in the world is also the person who had to learn, at some cost, that you cannot run it properly if you are running yourself into the ground. The vanguard is only possible if the person leading it is still standing.
