We opened DiverXO because polite food was putting us to sleep. The room is loud on purpose, the plates argue with each other on purpose, and somewhere a porcelain pig is probably staring at you. None of it is an accident.
It started with two cooks, a borrowed fryer, and a room nobody asked for in a backstreet off the Calle Tormenta. We could not afford calm, so we made noise instead. The first flying pig left the pass in 2017 and the diners either cheered or fled. The ones who cheered told their friends. The ones who fled also told their friends. Either way, we were full by spring.
What people miss, behind the hot pink and the acid green, is how much of this is engineering. Chaos is the look. Underneath it every gram is weighed, every second is timed, and every joke on the plate has been rehearsed until it lands. You sit down expecting dinner and leave having had an argument with your own taste buds, which is exactly the point.
Be too much.
Restraint is for people with less to say. We season for the back row.
Surprise or get out.
If you can guess the dish from the name, the dish has already failed.
Loud but precise.
The riot is the look. The discipline underneath it is the whole job.
Where the chaos comes from
Growers who do not return our calls
Our produce comes from small Spanish farms, natural growers, and a handful of stubborn fishermen on the Galician coast who land what they land and tell us to deal with it. We build the menu around what shows up, not the other way around.
The cellar of bad influences
Niko fills the cellar with natural wine, forgotten sherry, and bottles that should not work. Many come from families who make a few hundred bottles a year and would rather we did not talk about them. So we will not, much.
Fire, ferment, and a lot of testing
Almost everything here meets the coals or the ferment cupboard before it meets you. The fun part looks reckless. The work behind it is months of weighing, tasting, burning the first nine attempts, and keeping the tenth.