Meat is the centre of it, worked every way: charcuterie, escabeches, foies, grilled and roasted, cured, raw, marinated, salted, steamed or stewed. But vegetables, greens, legumes, mushrooms and fruit are protagonists too, not treated as garnish.

Rural opened in November 2023 at Marqués de Cubas 8, about 100 metres from Estimar Madrid. The idea had been around for years under the working name 'Estimar y Montaña', and in the end the team dropped fish and shellfish altogether for what they describe as an ode to the primitive, to the origin of how humans ate on land. There's no tasting-menu format as such; the carta is meant to be read as a sequence of courses that builds, in the team's own words, towards the cochinillo or the chop.

At around 70 seats it's more than twice the size of Estimar. A bar at the entrance, with Joselito hams on view, leads down a curving corridor to a Segovian wood oven, then splits into two dining rooms, with kitchens visible throughout and a private room with its own entrance on Calle Zorrilla. Cristina Carulla Studio designed the space as a set of dim, cave-like rooms in earth and ochre tones, with natural leather chairs and sofas and almost no decoration.

The carta opens with charcuterie: Joselito ham, a selection of cured meats from Huelva and Salamanca, Cal-Rovira sobrasada with honeycomb, a duo of wagyu and Rubia Gallega cecina, and a house partridge terrine with pistachio and foie. Then pickles and escabeches, a cold room with wagyu steak tartare and wagyu carpaccio with foie gras, and a 'bocatería' of molletes of pork jowl or steak tartare and a wagyu steak tartare bikini with caviar and foie cream, a meat version of Zafra's famous bikini.

The fire has its own chapter, with Josper, Castilian oven, Basque grill and robata. Quail thighs pay homage to elBulli's 1987 dish, a lamb skewer honours the Seville restaurant Alhucemas, and there are lentils with pigeon and foie, a trio of sweetbreads, Bresse chicken and solomillo Rossini. The finale is the big pieces: 21-day Segovian cochinillo, with training from the Sandoval family, Galician chops aged 40 to 120 days, Argentine and A4 wagyu cuts, and a chop served three ways. The Disfrutón menu runs the whole story for €125 before drinks, and the desserts include a coulant of tarta de Santiago made with turrón and a torrija finished on the coals.

The wine list, built by maîtrelier Juanma Galán, runs past 350 references and leans on Spanish reds, split between 'De la Tierra', small-production wines from native varieties, and 'Clásicos de España', the historic names of each region. A section called La Sacristía holds older vintages from great traditional bodegas.