Evolution and Origin

The new season at the Quique Dacosta Restaurante has begun. We never tire of showing how proud we are of this beautiful land where we find ourselves. It is, undoubtedly, a privileged place with a climate that favours an exceptional pantry. From a hedonistic point of view, there is little more we can ask for, and we love being able to offer gastronomic pleasures to our clients every day.

Our cuisine is an accomplice of the wonderful local produce, of its seasonality, of tradition as a support as well as the core of our creations. Innovation is our attitude: it is what moves us and brings about new ideas year after year. We love seducing our diners, and that search sparks dishes filled with expressiveness and feeling. Touches of madness, boldness, radicalism, romanticism - and also pragmatism - imbue our process.

Our cuisine here and now is the sum of many circumstances. This season, in particular, emerged from the seed of DNA The Search (2017 season), and is now the companion and the compass of origin, the path we have decided to tread. A cry of reaffirmation and belief in ourselves, in our produce and where we are. A land that is much more important than what we could ever create or have created. After all, this restaurant – my team and I – are just a occurrence in time. Dénia has given me everything needed to build the cook and the person that I am; my unwritten destiny in which I am glad I had no say. The profession seduced me before the produce did, and after that the town. But it is the people who have made me who I am.

Origin is also produce. It is something that has always been present in our work and which has been our ally. It is another compass that does not allow us to stray from here. I know this land because of its produce, a mental map that eventually led me to its villages, to its people. An intimate way of knowing my place, this place. Learning about everything together, learning that the produce responds depending on how you treat it. It responds affectionately if you treat it tenderly, it responds with quality if you treat it with understanding. This is why I believe in the innocence of the produce. And thanks to its innocence and its gastronomic generosity, I can build this story that is told creation by creation, dish by dish.

Our interest in evolution is what sparks our work every day. Working to create morsels that are, in some way, new and seductive. I believe in every kind of evolution: in the evolution of thought, of cooking, of the arts, of technology, of science. Creation is part of evolution. I enjoy and freely express what I feel, and this is a reflection of what I do and have done. It is time to show it.

And I also firmly believe in the origin of things. The legacy of history and how it has marked us and marks our evolution. We are, at once, both origin and evolution.

The cuisine we have today is made up of age-old ingredients and ancestral creations that coexist with modernity, fantasy, our language and style. We work with creations such as salted foods and pickles that were already there. We have given them our personal twist, new rules and an intimate feel. We have researched and built on what went before, something so laden with history and anthropology, so attached to the land, that it seduced us completely. We have achieved results that are truly different, but we recognize that their spark is ancestral and also inspiring.

This season, I offer you a cuisine that is imbued with an elegant fantasy both carefully considered and planned. We use exceptional produce that represents our region, knowing that it gives our work authenticity. A cuisine that sometimes stems from the past, but above all from dreams, and whose evolutionary aim is, in the end, to move you.

I am the inheritance; I am the dishes I cook.