Pakta (CLOSED)

Pakta earned a Michelin star in 2014, which signified Spain's entry into the gastronomic Olympus of a cuisine that, over the previous 25 years, had gone from misery to opulence; as the Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo has said, the cuisine of his childhood had tasted good but looked terrible, as it was made to mask scarcity. That star also meant that the Spanish avant-garde of cooking looks to the south, not to the north. Albert Adrià has made the double pirouette of consistently reinventing a cuisine that is already an accident in itself. He created, without any rules or standards, wonders like a smoked mackerel maki where rolled Peruvian 'causa' stands in for the rice (unfortunately, that item is no longer on the menu).