Pintxos, Part III
A chef-owned villa in Andalucía, indie bookstores in Madrid, a Japanese New Wave film shot in Spain
Spanish Chefs Are Making Their Way to the Front of House


Are we living in the golden age of chef-run hotels? It seems so. I can think of at least a dozen chef-owned hotels that have opened in the past year—among them, Ørja Johannesen's Beckerwyc House in Bergen, Norway, José Avillez's Casa Nossa in Portugal’s Alentejo region, Rōze Traore's La Fouchette in Côte d’Ivoire. Spain, too, has plenty of examples. Last year, the duo behind Extremadura’s three-starred Michelin restaurant Atrio Cáceres launched a hotel inside a nearby 13th-century palace; guests have priority access to the fine-dining restaurant and the more casual sister concept. In the Rías Baixas region of Galicia, chef Xosé T. Cannas recently opened a modernist hotel at the foot of his celebrated restaurant Pepe Vieira. VIP experiences include menu testing in Cannas’s kitchen, private tours of the nearby Bodega Albamar winery, and front-row access to the Rapa das Bestas horse shearing festival (yes, that’s a thing).
But I think the coolest of the lot is chef José Pizarro’s Iris Zahara villa in Zahara do los Atunes, about 70 kilometers south of Càdiz. The cliffside property looks a bit like Los Angeles’s Stahl house—clean, spare lines, windows as walls, dramatic views—and was built as Pizarro’s vacation home, but in 2022, he opened it up as an exclusive-use villa. (If it looks familiar, it’s because the house and beach below were used as stand-ins for the island of Mustique in “The Crown.”) But guests don’t just get the keys to Pizarro’s home; they also get to spend time with him during intimate dinner parties, beach picnics, culinary tours of Seville and Vejer de la Frontera, and market visits to shop for salt-cured mojama and freshly caught atún rojo. A next-level gastronomic experience.
Podium Push: Barcelona Prepares to Host the World’s Most Prestigious Sailing Race — Plus, Four New Galleries to Seek Out On Your Next Trip


Barcelona is in full-on preparation mode for the 37th America’s Cup, which sets sail August through October. If you haven’t watched this Netflix documentary (which I highly recommend), you might not know that this is sailing’s most prestigious trophy—and this year’s race is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. There’s a lot of excitement in the air, with restaurants popping up, soon-to-open hotels like Miiro and SLS, and revived city spaces including Port Olímpic and the Ciutadella Greenhouse. The energy seems to have trickled into the arts scene, as well. My friend Juliana Sorondo, whom I profiled in this newsletter, has just opened a temporary gallery on Trafalgar Street and a by-appointment salon in Eixample. In Poble Sec, Araucària Galeria d’Art inaugurated its new space with an exhibition of works by local talents including Honduran-born artist Gian Padilla Suarez (who also has an excellent gallery of her own in the neighborhood). Poblenou’s VASTO gallery is one of the most beautiful art spaces I’ve even been in; it doubles as the private home of the creative couple Carmen Riestra and Albert Monjo. And last summer, the Mater museum opened inside a palace in El Born. The inaugural exhibition was centered on artists who lived and worked in the neighborhood in the 1970s-’90s.
Madrid By the Book


Madrid is one of Europe’s most bookish capitals, with literary-themed barrios and more than 600 independent bookshops. Serious collectors beeline for classic spots like Bardón and Pérgamo, the latter of which is Madrid’s oldest bookstore and is packed to the gills with classics and rare, out-of-print books. Personally, I’m most excited by all the new community-centric additions. There’s the magazine shop Paperground; the publishing house/gallery/bookshops Ivorypress, opened by art curator Ochoa Foster and her husband, the British architect Norman Foster; Librería La Mistral, founded by Argentine writer and bookseller Andrea Stefanoni; and the Salamanca newcomer La Lectora Infiel, whose owner has admitted she’s “not attracted to best-sellers” because “there are so many more interesting books to discover.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to buena onda to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.