An avant-garde tasting-menu format for at most ten diners. Two menus shift with the season, one of them fully vegan and vegetarian by design rather than as an adaptation, and there are three pairings: a classic wine flight, grand wines and a non-alcoholic option.

Dishes on Origen have included Galician langoustine with foie gras ravioli, red tuna paired with Iberian pork, black grouper with Ganxet beans and clams, and Australian A5 Wagyu with purple potato, while dessert can turn provocative, from a cauliflower 'anti-dessert' to a Calvados pâté en croûte. Freixa sums up the approach as product, technique and emotion, and says that without tradition there is no avant-garde.

Ramón Freixa grew up among flour, bread and stoves, cooking as a child in his grandparents' bakery in Castellfollit de Riubregós, in Catalonia. In 1994 he joined his family's Barcelona restaurant, El Racó d'en Freixa, taking charge of its kitchen in 1998 and keeping the Michelin star it had held since 1988.

In 2009 he moved to Madrid to open Ramón Freixa Madrid at the Hotel Único, which won its first star just five months after opening and soon held two stars and three Repsol Soles. He closed it at the end of 2024, and in July 2025 opened two restaurants together at Velázquez 24, the larger Tradición and this ten-seat Atelier, which won two Michelin stars in the 2026 guide.

Atelier was designed by the interior designer Alejandra Pombo around one piece: an imposing U-shaped table in root wood, seating a maximum of ten, facing an open kitchen where Freixa and his team prepare every dish in front of the diners. The table is laid with Limoges porcelain, hand-blown glassware and silver cutlery, a deliberately theatrical setting for a single sitting.

A Brazilian marble bar separates the kitchen from the table, so diners can follow the plating, and the room sits under stucco vaulting. José Chafer's sculpture 'Origen', which gives the main menu its name, stands in the room, and the space is scented with Loewe's 'Un paseo por Madrid'.

There are two tasting menus, both at €250, and both change with the season, the product and Freixa's inspiration. Origen is the main menu; Origen Vegetalia is entirely vegan and vegetarian, conceived as a statement of intent rather than an adaptation.

Three pairings complete the meal: the Armonía Ramón Freixa Atelier wine pairing at €190, a non-alcoholic pairing, Armonía Orígenes Mediterráneos, also at €190, and Armonía Grandes Vinos, built on grand wines, at €420.

The wine list runs to more than 800 references, around 90% of them Spanish, with a weakness for small producers whose releases run to under 1,000 bottles: Madrid garnachas, the Gredos winemakers of Comando G, Envínate from Tenerife. It rotates every three to four months, and at the top end it reaches Salon and Jacques Selosse Champagne, Petrus and Romanée-Conti. The non-alcoholic pairing takes its cue from perfumery.

Atelier serves dinner only, Wednesday to Saturday from 20:30, and is closed Sunday to Tuesday. With a maximum of ten diners a night around a single table, it is worth booking well ahead through the reservation page on the restaurant's own site. The nearest metro stations are Velázquez and Serrano.

Freixa runs two restaurants at the same address, Calle Velázquez 24. Atelier is the intimate, avant-garde counter for ten; Ramón Freixa Tradición, next door, is the larger room, with a contemporary reading of traditional cuisine. His former two-star Ramón Freixa Madrid, at the Hotel Único, closed at the end of 2024.