La Tasquería: A Michelin Star for Offal in Madrid
Dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant used to follow a set script: foie gras, lobster, caviar and a discreet silence over the bill. At La Tasquería the script falls apart the moment the menu arrives, with pig's ear, lamb tongue and confit pig's head where the lobster should be.
La Tasquería is a restaurant in Madrid that built its whole menu on offal - and holds a Michelin star for it. Chef Javi Estévez took ingredients that have always been part of Spanish cuisine but that special-occasion dining never wanted to own, and serves them as a tasting menu with the full ceremony.
The Chef Who Hid Tripe in the Name
The name of the place is an admitted pun. Spaniards have the tasca, the little bar where you nibble at something over a drink, and the casquería, which is both the shop that sells offal and the collective word for offal itself. Estévez's family glued the two words together, because plain casquería sounded too raw for a restaurant name - the offal had to go through a rebranding first, and only then could you invite people to come and eat it.
Estévez didn't come out of nowhere. In 2013 he competed in the first season of Spain's Top Chef, finished fifth, and in February 2015 he opened a place seating just under forty guests in the Salamanca district. Michelin first listed him under Bib Gourmand - good food at a sensible price - and the 2019 guide gave him a star. He has held on to it ever since, and picked up recognition from the rival Repsol Guide along the way. The kitchen is still on show: it opens onto the dining room, three bar stools sit right at the stove, and anyone who wants to can watch the cooks at work all evening.
Casquería: What Madrid Never Hid
Madrid itself never hid its offal - it ate it out on the street, in plain sight. Callos a la madrileña, tripe stewed with chickpeas and sausage, turns up in Spanish literature as early as 1599. By the El Rastro market the gallinejeras fried lamb offal right there on the pavement, and a plate of fried intestines was part of the May feast of San Isidro. None of this is a Madrid peculiarity: every other Spaniard eats offal at least once a month, and after Madrid the biggest fans are Catalonia and the Basque Country. Half of Europe cooks tripe anyway - Polish flaki, Turkish işkembe çorbası, the tripe soup we make back home in Czechia. And long before nose to tail gave English a phrase for cooking the whole animal, the winter pig slaughter back home was doing exactly that.
Estévez doesn't turn that tradition into a museum piece. In interviews he keeps saying that anyone who eats foie gras eats offal too, they just don't admit it. He also demolishes the idea that this is cheap food: with some cuts, cleaning strips away up to 60 percent of the weight, so the "waste" ingredient eats up more work and more time than plenty of tenderloin does. What ends up on the plate looks like it came from any other Michelin restaurant; it's just that under the herbs there's tongue instead of sea bass.
Three Menus and One Move
Ordering here is simple: three tasting menus graded by length, 42, 55 and 75 EUR when I visited. Unlike most starred places, the whole table doesn't have to take the same menu - everyone puts together their own sequence of courses, and the plates then get passed around. You'll need a reservation, and you book it online. Just double-check the address: in March 2024 the restaurant moved from Salamanca to the Chamberí district and today (September 2026) it is at Calle Modesto Lafuente 82; the original space now houses the more casual offshoot La Barra de La Tasquería.
Four Courses Between Three of Us
I took my parents to La Tasquería and we ordered the four-course menu - each of us a different combination, so the table soon turned into a tasting of almost the entire list. Before the first course came house bread with Spanish olive oil and an amuse bouche served on newspaper: a savory macaron, two slices of cured pork fat and a piece of pork crackling. Cracklings in a starred restaurant - the first proof that they are serious about offal here.
Then the parade got going: tapas with marinated fish and olives, beef tongue with chanterelles, a course in a dark broth with something crisp and fried alongside, rabbit hearts on potato purée, a mug of stewed meat and fideos with seafood. The tongue was so soft that the knife had nothing to do, and the hearts had a spring to them and a flavor as dense as a long-simmered broth. Three desserts followed, and a petit four to see us off.
The one thing that grated that evening was the English - making myself understood to the staff was a bigger puzzle than anything on the plate, which comes as a surprise in a starred restaurant. Everything else went smoothly. A four-course menu for three, with bread, amuse bouche, petit four, a bottle of wine and water: 180 EUR.
La Tasquería
