Contemporary Spanish cooking rooted in product and in the family's research, with menus that rotate with the seasons and a vegetarian alternative running through every one of them. The enduring signature is the roasted suckling pig, the dish that links today's two-star kitchen to the rotisserie the family ran in Humanes.

Coque is named after a person: it was the nickname of the brothers' grandfather, who in the mid-1950s ran a bar called La Peña in Humanes de Madrid, working the front of house while his wife cooked. In 1976 their parents, Teresa Huertas and Rafael Sandoval, opened a rotisserie in Humanes and named it Coque, and the family cooked in that same building for more than 40 years and three generations.

In 2017 the brothers moved Coque into central Madrid, to 1,100 square metres on Calle del Marqués del Riscal. It holds two Michelin stars, a Michelin Green Star and three Repsol Soles, belongs to Relais & Châteaux and Les Grandes Tables du Monde, and scored 96 points on La Liste 2025.

Coque is built as a journey through six spaces rather than a single dining room. The meal starts standing at the cocktail bar, then moves through Ónix, a mineral passage, down to the wine cellar, on to the sacristy and the open kitchen, and ends seated in the dining room. The brothers designed the roughly 1,100-square-metre space with the designer Jean Porsche when they brought Coque to central Madrid in 2017.

The current menu, Eat with Art, pairs 16 dishes by Mario Sandoval with 15 contemporary artworks curated by Juan Alfaro Studio, each work translated into a plate as the meal moves from space to space. The first five dishes follow the route through the building: at the cocktail bar, scallop with Godello, shallot and green Ibarra pepper, set against Stefan Brüggemann's Puddle Painting 6; in Ónix, red prawn with whisky, sweet paprika and pink pepper beside a Fabienne Verdier; in the wine cellar, a grape and cheese fritter with pecans and honey for Teresa de la Pisa's plant structures; in the sacristy, fighting-bull steak tartare and oxtail cannelloni under Joana Vasconcelos' Atila; and in the kitchen, sea cucumber with pil pil, ají amarillo and mole poblano for Daniel Canogar's Synesthesia. The dining-room courses bring in Donna Huanca, Jonathan Meese, Secundino Hernández, José Manuel Ballester, Antoni Tàpies, Barthélémy Toguo, Jordan Kerwick, Carlos Albert and Anita Suárez de Lezo, and dessert closes on Aldo Chaparro.

It costs €495 per person, or €855 with the Armonía wine pairing and €1,155 with the Premium pairing, all VAT included. A vegetarian version runs at €395, with the same pairing options, and the menus change with the seasons.

The menu before it, the Madrid Menu, told the city's culinary history in 17 courses, from the 9th century to today, across the same six spaces.

Wine is Rafael Sandoval's department, and the cellar holds more than 3,000 wines and spirits from five continents, with Spanish appellations at its heart. Its oddest treasure is a barrel that was meant for the writer Washington Irving and never made it to America. Rafael builds two pairings: Armonía, chosen around the produce on the plate, and Premium, which reaches for labels such as Vega Sicilia Reserva Especial. The wine cellar is also one of the rooms the meal passes through, and the evening opens at the cocktail bar, where the first dishes of the menu are served.

Coque has worked with Spain's national research council, the CSIC, since 2011, and Mario Sandoval divides his time between the kitchen and the laboratory. The projects arrive roughly one a year. It started in 2011 with the restaurant's own pig, a cross with 30% less fat, raised on its mother's milk and roasted over holm-oak wood. Then came gastrogenomics, DNA analysis of native Madrid produce for urban gardens, in 2012; egg hydrolysis with CSIC researcher Marta Miguel, for lactose- and gluten-free preparations, in 2013; Vinesenti, polyphenols from grape pomace as a salt alternative, in 2014; natural aroma extraction with supercritical fluids, with Elena Ibáñez, in 2015; an analysis of fighting-bull meat in 2016; fermented living foods in 2017; natural fibres as emulsifiers in 2018; and the 'vinification' of food with yeasts and barrel tartaric acid in 2019.

The latest line, from 2026, is computational gastronomy with Proxima Alpha, modelling the physics of roasting across more than 5,000 test programs. IMIDRA, Madrid's agricultural research institute, works with the kitchen on native Madrid fruit and vegetables. In November 2025 the Mario Sandoval Foundation and the CSIC held the first Science, Cooking and Future Congress at the CSIC's Madrid headquarters, six dialogues each pairing a chef with a researcher. The research underpins the Michelin Green Star the restaurant holds for sustainability.