Diego Guerrero is holding a copy of his 2016 chef book, titled “irreductible” (“indomitable”). A nearly life-sized and very lifelike portrait of Diego stares back from the book’s stark white cover, defying the relentless march of time. Guerrero had just celebrated his 50th birthday a few days earlier.
In Spain, a mid-life crisis is called “la crisis de los años 50,” and after wishing him feliz cumpleaños, I ask if he is feeling any symptoms of the dreaded syndrome. Caught off guard, he brushes off my overly personal question with as much grace as he can muster on such short notice.
Crisis? What crisis? Nothing of the kind.
Actually, Diego Guerrero still looks amazingly like his book cover portrait of nearly a decade earlier. Yes, he now wears glasses, but his gaze is still defiant under a veneer of professional friendliness. He still has a full head of unruly locks that a rocker would envy. He ran over 10km before work that morning, and he challenges himself to create 50 new dishes a year for DSTAgE, his vanguardist 2-Michelin-starred restaurant in the sophisticated yet bohemian Las Salesas neighborhood of Madrid.
Guerrero means “warrior.” At 50, he looks fit and in fighting form. To have made it this long in this business, he’d have to be. Hotheaded young chefs are a dime a dozen, but it is a rare revolutionary who makes it to middle age in restaurant years with their sanity and creative vision intact.
If turning 50 is a touchy milestone for humans, passing the decade marker is an equally watershed moment for a restaurant, especially one that had a meteoric beginning. If people go through growing pains and midlife crises, I wonder if restaurants might do the same.
How do restaurants navigate mid-career doubts and fatigue? How do chefs stay motivated to keep up the fight? Obviously, restaurants don’t divorce and buy a flashy sports car. Maybe hire a new publicist, launch a cooking show? Maybe, like Noma 2.0, you announce that you are closing, only to pop up again somewhere else with renewed energy. How does a haute cuisine restaurant stay relevant with changing times and tastes? Does the creative potential of a chef have an expiration date?
There is plenty of discussion about the nature of creativity, but much less about the nurture of creativity over the long haul. After 11 years captaining DSTAgE through some turbulent waters, Diego Guerrero might have something to say about it.
Up until this point, however, our interview for this article had been like a live version of interviews he had recorded before. It had started off with the standard backstage tour. He showed me the bar, with its exposed brickwork dominated by the now iconic Days to Smell Taste Amaze grow & Enjoy acronym painting done by his mother for the restaurant’s opening. A glassed-in atrium brings natural light bathed in soft green into the heart of DSTAgE’s steampunk urban vibe.
On the trophy shelf, a tubby Michelin Man figurine sports a black “WHAT THE FUCK IS DSTAgE” T-shirt.
That is precisely what I am here trying to figure out.
We walked through a warren of tunnels and hallways papered over with original concert posters and restaurant memorabilia to DSPOT, Guerrero’s creative lab. A flashing neon REVO˩ution sign hangs over the entry. I was expecting to see more fermentation rooms and lyophilization setups, but it looked more like a cool coworking/chill-out lounge occupied on one side by a year-by-year pin-up catalogue of DSTAgE dishes, on the other by a burly bearded man in a black DSTAgE baseball cap working with an Apple desktop and a mannequin. He turned out to be haute couture fashion designer Sergio de Lázaro, formerly of Hermes and Dior, now founder of his own Madrid-based fashion brand, Casa Otrura. Creatives like to hang out together, cross pollinating.
What Chef Guerrero didn’t know before our meeting was that this was not my first time at DSTAgE. Years ago, Basque food photographer José Luis López de Zubiría had told me about this restaurant during one of my trips to Spain, and he somehow snagged us a last-minute reservation. The indomitable cookbook Diego Guerrero is holding now is the copy he had signed for me during my first visit in July 2017, and it still held a hot pink souvenir DSTAgE guitar pick and vinyl record-shaped coaster between its pages.
In 2021, I went to DSTAgE again as well as to DSPEAKEASY, the now defunct casual eatery that had opened in 2019.
So by sheer coincidence, I had visited DSTAgE at three different but key stages of its trajectory: in its decadent early years, then again just after the pandemic lockdown, and most recently in May 2025, to write this article. It was like seeing a time-lapse video of the same actor in different productions on the same stage.
Looking over my old notes and the pictures pinned to the wall gallery at DSPOT, it’s clear that under all the innovation and creative movement, the core identity and values of DSTAgE had stayed remarkably stable over the years, like its decor.
Diego Guerrero was even talking about the same themes in 2025 that he had said in numerous earlier interviews and in his 2016 book: DSTAgE is about breaking the rules–or better yet, getting rid of the rules. Freedom. For Guerrero, the restaurant has to be a true reflection of who he is, or the project doesn’t make sense anymore. Clearly, since the restaurant is still open, he still has something to say.
He has been saying from the beginning that he wanted his cuisine to be a free expression of inner self, a natural language to communicate directly with clients without artifice or affect.
“Free to be me” seems to be his enduring mantra, as every rebellious teenager in the history of the world can relate.
“Libero di essere me stesso” sembra essere il suo mantra permanente, come può raccontare ogni adolescente ribelle nella storia del mondo.
Two characteristics were also consistent throughout: highly technical, cerebral cooking and a high tolerance for risk.
But even if the exposed brick walls and the chef’s doggedly idiosyncratic style were constants, the actual restaurant experience itself was totally different each time. Because they were spaced so far apart at exactly 4-year intervals, each of my visits was like a first visit. As the DSPOT photo gallery shows, the plates are in a perpetual state of reinvention that reaches even beyond evolution. The DSTAgE of 2025 has evolved to the point of being unrecognisable from the DSTAgE circa 2017.
What was unclear was whether on any given day the diner would love or hate the meal. Actually, in any given DSTAgE meal, it’s entirely possible to love one dish and hate the next, but Guerrero wouldn’t have it any other way. Potential failure is the price of taking risks. If you are going to play it safe, you may as well be dead.
The archetypal rebel youth objective has always been to provoke any reaction other than boredom or indifference. Whatever they say about beauty being in the eye of the beholder is even more true about how people might react to eating fermented tuna eye.
Even less clear is the future of disruptive fine dining, or whether fine dining can continue as we know it, creative or not. Has haute cuisine itself been disrupted? At this question, Guerrero sighed and shook his head. Difficult, he said. The world is changing. There has been a paradigm shift since the pandemic, and we can no longer play this new game by the old rules.
After the rebellion and the Covid apocalypse, where da fuck do we go from here?
Rebellion is by definition reactionary. Before he decided to take the iconoclastic culinary route, Diego Guerrero had followed a distinguished but traditional apprenticeship into the professional kitchen, graduating from Bilbao’s Zabalburu Culinary School with top honors, followed by stints at Basque institutions like Martin Berasategui and Goizeko Kabi before earning 2 Michelin stars during his 12 years at the venerable Club Allard in Madrid.
In 2013, he abandoned it all to pursue his solo dream. He had waited in the wings long enough. It was time to put his name on a shingle and hang it up, no investors or strings attached. Well, maybe not his actual name, but an acronym containing his initials, Dg. Time to take the dream and turn it into a destination.
On July 1, 2014, just as the city was winding down for its summertime siesta, DSTAgE burst onto the Madrid dining scene, earning its first Michelin star in a matter of months. By the time Guerrero birthed the 1,8 kg, 255-page “indomitable” tome eighteen months later in November 2016, DSTAgE had already garnered its second Michelin macaron in record time for its playful, cutting-edge cuisine in a rock’n’roll speakeasy setting. On the rollercoaster of restaurant life, November 2016 was the moment Diego Guerrero and DSTAgE reached dizzying heights. At the top of the world, on the cusp of triumph, it’s natural to feel indomitable.
But over time, even the act of being true to yourself takes on a different meaning because nothing stays the same.
It’s one thing to feel indomitable when you are about to conquer the world, quite another to survive the challenges and frustrations inherent to life in the kitchen, especially once the initial buzz dies down but there are still dreams that have yet to be fulfilled. That takes a different kind of indomitable spirit.
In those heady early days, I recall that DSTAgE was hopping. The discreet clubby IFYKYK entrance, deliberately unpolluted by a menu, and the industrial-chic exposed brick gave the mystique of a clandestine encounter in an exclusive NY loft. People were intrigued by the idea of haute cuisine in a restaurant that did not have the usual trappings of bourgeois luxury. (To be fair, other chefs in London, Paris and Copenhagen had done away with them a decade earlier).
Luxury was no longer signalled by Christofle silver on snowy tablecloths: the flex was getting a reservation in the first place to try dishes like a trompe l’œil purple garlic (filled with black garlic cream) or a sardine on a tomato French toast, a play on pa amb tomaquet and sardines on toast that Guerrero had first created at Club Allard.
The waitlist for one of the coveted 14 tables was months long. The novel (in Madrid, at least) open kitchen was intended to make every table feel like a trendy insider chef’s table. This was kitchen theatre without a net.
The initial DSTAgE experience involved an opening salvo of snacks served in the bar. These little bites were meant to titillate and challenge: perhaps a hyper-realistic whole fried anchovy that turns out not to contain any fish meat at all? Then, each party would go shimmying up the aisle in turns to the pass separating the open kitchen from the main dining area. Gathered around the counter, they could interact with the team and watch the next course being prepared live before their eyes. I seem to remember we had something billed as “fried eggs” prepared by the chef himself on the anti-grill, which turned into a guessing game involving (I think) bacon fat meringue on an egg white crisp.
The next act moved to the dining room, where the courses explored flavors and techniques from Thailand to South America, followed by after-dinner drinks back in the bar. I particularly remember an outstanding dish of merluza with angulas, a nod to pure Basque tradition, plus the chef’s generosity in sending out an extra dish, “México,” which came with a fiery Michelada served in a skull shot glass.
The vibe was more Studio 54 than Michelin fine dining, although the dining itself was fine enough. Some might dismiss the concept as frivolous, but it was undeniably fun. I noticed at that time that Guerrero had tattooed two Michelin stars on his arm, along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
On a roll, Guerrero expanded the DSTAgE conceptual umbrella by opening DSPOT, the creativity incubator, and DSPEAKEASY, DSTAgE’s more casual little brother. The goal was to create a kind of symbiotic circular economy, where products and ideas not used in one locale could be developed and featured in the other.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. The party came to an abrupt halt.
Spain and the rest of the world went into lockdown, and everything about life as we knew it changed. Some chefs tried their hand at takeout; others, like Dabiz Muñoz of DiverXo, broadcast quarantine home cooking videos on social media. Diego Guerrero coped by practicing yoga and collaborating with Jose Andrés’ World Central Kitchen emergency food relief nonprofit.
The Covid crisis coincided with DSTAgE´s sixth year, a milestone that many restaurants never reach even in normal times. According to figures from the Bank of Spain, Spanish restaurant failures in 2020 were 6% higher than in 2019, the vast majority of which were small, independent eateries.
DSPEAKEASY, which opened in 2019, six months before lockdown, eventually closed permanently in 2023. There is no room for sentimentalism or romanticism when running restaurants, even for rebel dreamers. The numbers have to work for dreams to come true.
DSTAgE survived the crisis, but its momentum took a hit. Maintaining those two Michelin stars and its client base would be critical for survival. But if it were to survive in an existential sense, DSTAgE would have to find a creative way forward to maintain its personal identity.
When I returned to DSTAgE in the summer of 2021, social distancing was still the rule. No more bopping about the various spaces, mingling with the chefs up close and personal. We stayed in place while the dishes did the dance. Maybe because of the more cautious post-pandemic atmosphere, my impression of that meal was that while there had been significant culinary evolution and innovation since my first visit, the dishes were somehow more comforting and crowd-pleasing than provocative and pyrotechnical.
The fiery ”México” of our first meal, while still retaining the skull glass chaser, had transformed into soothing, meditative “Maya 2021,” a visually stunning “ancient carved stone” sculpture of mole made of stewed hare in very tasty poblano sauce.
A pimiento rose had gone through all kinds of technical manipulations behind the scenes, but on the plate, it was visually very simple and approachable. One bite, and we were transported to a Basque farmhouse with smoky peppers hanging to dry from the rafters. If you happened to be Basque, it would have been a free trip home.
Another 2021 dish, Calamar a la romana, employed DSTAgE’s love of gustative/visual puns by making one comfort food classic – fried calamari – look like another local favorite, buñuelos de bacalao. Taken the other way around, what looked like a buñuelo de bacalao turned out to be a delicate tempura of pure calamar. Both sides of this dish evoked better, simpler days of relaxing in bars with friends and a beer, as did Chorizo al txakoli, a vegetarian faux chorizo. The meal ended with another nostalgia-inducing dish, a gilded mango/lime meringue “corn cob” wrapped in spiced candy floss similar to the Maiz 2017 that I remembered fondly from the first visit. It rarely hurts to remind people of childhood.
That night, July 17, 2021, DSTAgE offered traumatized diners emotional security blankets. It was just what we needed.
Now, in 2025, COVID has receded into a distant nightmare. After the early storms, now both the chef and his restaurant are facing down the identity crisis of the “años 50.” Guerrero says that with maturity, external validation means less to him, which grants even more personal freedom.
Maintaining creativity over the long haul requires a long-distance strategy, like running a marathon. Sustainability is an obvious theme at DSTAgE, both in terms of natural and human resources. In the beginning, DSTAgE chefs worked round the clock, burning the candle at both ends to invent new dishes while working a full service twice a day. At 50, Guerrero knows that he must work better, not harder.
Ideas take time and investment, a tall order if you are not backed by investors. They might not grow on trees, but they might in a lab. To ramp up creativity and create a more sustainable work-life balance, 14% of the restaurant budget now goes toward underwriting a dedicated development/product team of chefs and scientific researchers called i+D.
This creative team works strictly 10:00-18:00, freeing up the chefs to focus on cooking. And because restaurant service hours can be unpredictable, DSTAgE now opens for only 7 weekly meal services rather than 10. The idea is to work fewer hours, but more strategically.
In the 2025 menu, the lab efforts are on full display. The myriad of techniques utilized are footnoted and cross-referenced: lyophilisation, fermentation, maturation, distillation, enzymatic manipulation. The dishes have become more austere, more conceptual–maybe less substantial in a material sense, but with more substance, depending on your attitude toward thought as food and your appetite for consuming laudable values like sustainability in the form of fermented fish and repurposed trash. DSTAgE has gone from Studio 54 to conceptual art studio.
Tuna eyeball appeared twice on the menu, the first time as a reduced miso toffee under strips of sea bass lardo and dotted with cocoa butter. As a Japanese, the result to me is actually familiar and reminiscent of shiokara – raw seafood in a brown paste of fermented fish guts – requiring strong sake to wash down. Both shiokara and tuna eyeballs would qualify as chinmi, an acquired taste.
In Omega 3, we are treated to a pool of tuna eyeball collagen with freeze-dried bluefish flakes, making sure none of that eyeball goes to waste. I’m just hoping that this dish is good for my cholesterol.
Guerrero’s signature love of trompe l’œil and puns persist in dishes like Tuétano, a boneless faux marrow bone, and Huevos rotos, a wonderful concoction that looks like perretxico mushrooms over a broken poached egg that is actually a yuba-textured emulsion of squid and egg proteins. “Pizza” is a crust of wheat koji impregnated with camembert fungal spores, so it has the downy texture of a camembert rind.
Merluza en salsa verde is this year’s beautifully executed nod to traditional Basque cuisine, never obvious but never forgotten. However, many of the dishes are abstractions, both visually and on the palate. Some, like Petrichor, are spectacularly beautiful. This organic mosaic captures the bewitching aroma of wet leaves after rain, which science has helpfully, if prosaically, identified as geosmina. The taste is exactly of wet leaves and moss.
Dry Mar, nearly transparent, looks like a jellyfish martini and tastes like an oyster. It turns out to be the nucleus pulposus of a swordfish, the gelatinous center of the intervertebral disk, a fascinating play of textures in a seaweed kombucha.
Like The Little Prince, Guerrero says he sees best with his eyes closed, for that which is essential is invisible to the eye. To succeed, his dishes require active audience participation, depending on diners to reach out with their hearts.
Less romantic diners might just see a trend of replacing an already dubious 36-hour sous vide blade steak (Solomillo Carnicero, 2017) with the idea of a steak (Txuleta/Piquillo, 2025). If you close your eyes and mix the freeze-dried roasted pepper paste into the puddle of beef fat, it does taste rather like steak with piquillo peppers. This would be a hit on the International Space Station, and if Elon Musk has his way, this might be how we will all be eating on Mars.
Virtue-signaling is a powerful seasoning these days. Zero-waste thinking recently earned DSTAgE a green Michelin sustainability star, but that third star has remained elusive.
There remains the nagging midlife question:
“Is this all there is?”
The Diego Guerrero I see today in 2025 seems no less restless or ambitious than the one I met at the beginning. He might be speaking calmly of creativity expiration dates, acknowledging that nothing can go on forever. However, he gives the distinct impression of a knight with an unfulfilled quest. He has no intention of reliving the past, nor of riding into the sunset just yet. At this point in his career, it’s now or never. Guerrero has decided to plow full steam ahead with his vision, torpedoes be damned.
The biggest potential key to culinary longevity is another term that Diego Guerrero has been using from the very beginning: commitment. Commitment to one’s dreams, to see them come to life in the kitchen. In fact, this is the inscription he wrote in my copy of his “Indomitable” cookbook, back in 2017:
“Porque es el amor y el compromiso por nuestro oficio lo que nos hacen irreductibles”.
“Because it’s our love and dedication to our craft that make us unstoppable”.
Diego Guerrero DSTAgE
