Spain Diaries: The rain that falls mainly on the plain

Noise and chaos inside and out in rainy Madrid

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, as the old saying goes. Well, on this Sunday in Madrid the rain falls on the plain but also everywhere else, in great volume. It may be late summer but Spain’s capital is trapped under leaden skies and a persistent drizzle that is poised to turn into a torrent later in the day.

There’s only one thing to do on a day like this - eat. And though when I want good food I wouldn’t normally be advised to enter a department store, even a huge one like El Corte Inglés, if I happen to find myself in the swanky Salamanca district of Madrid that’s exactly what I’d do.

That’s because hidden here in amongst the perfume and clothes and shoppers is a restaurant created by the three-time Best Chef in the World, Dabiz Muñoz. But it’s not stuffy or posh or service with white gloves. StreetXO is Muñoz’s casual offering, serving Asian-inspired dishes at pace in an environment that brings to mind the sort of place an eight-year-old would come up with if given a few hundred thousand euro and asked to design a restaurant.

StreetXO offers no separate tables for intimate dining. The dining is intimate but only in the sense that the presence of everyone else in the room is completely unignorable. All of those lucky enough to be eating the food rather than making it are sat around the kitchen, a rectangular area filled with chefs and servers doing passable impressions of sardines.

They shimmy and push and barge their way past and sometimes practically through their colleagues to either shout at their section of diners what’s good that day (everything) or to make some of the food right there on the counter. In front of us as we sit two men tag team making a lasagne. Or at least a version of a lasagne that befits being designed by the greatest chef in the world. One man spoons some beef onto the plate, another a layer of sauce, that at least is the same as usual.

StreetXO is the perfect place to visit in Madrid if you like being over-stimulated. After ten minutes in the dining room, which is filled with the kitchen and with walls surrounding it scrawled with decorations that almost scream at you, my head pounds and ears ring and my brain is constantly telling my eyes to look over there! watch this! get a load of that!

Oh and I haven’t mentioned the noise yet. The noise is ever-present and all-encompassing. There’s the aforementioned chatter and holler from the servers, there’s the clash of pots and pans and the shouts of the chefs straining to be heard. There’s the sound of ovens and flames and food sizzling on grills and on top of all of this, as if this weren’t enough, there’s the kind of music best suited to a rave that comes with a health warning on entry and a free voucher to visit an ear, nose and throat clinic.

Am I in a club? A bar? Am I having a fever dream? It’s only the food arriving that allows me to snap out of my impending crisis and let another sense take a beating. StreetXO is a multi-sensory experience alright, if something can be called a multi-sensory experience when all of your senses are exclaiming, in unison, Jesus Christ.

But it is my sense of taste that is having the best time. My eyes may be tired and bloodshot from overstimulation, my ears may be starting a ring that won’t subside until I get on the plane out of here, out of Madrid and out of Spain, but in between bites my sense of taste, my tongue, is singing hallelujah.

What’s the point of trying to describe this food? It’s food that is designed by the three-time best chef in the world - it’s brilliant. I have said before and will say again that Anthony Bourdain I am not. Jay Rayner’s job is safe. I will for once not go on and on and instead let the pictures do the talking. Eating at StreetXO is what my agnostic self assumes a religious experience is like. I open my heart and it’s not God that’s waiting to come in, but a slow-cooked leg of meat that I seriously consider settling down with.

Then right in the middle of all of this, all of the sights and sounds and tastes there is an alarm. A sharp buzz in my pocket and a siren cuts through the room. Most people’s phones are ringing to tell them to stay at home, go inside, Madrid is experiencing rain that shuts down a city. And we are here on the third floor of El Corte Inglés. Our server looks at his phone and shrugs, nothing can be as severe as what’s happening in here.

Everyone carries on eating. Perhaps the fact that the outside in a room such as this feels a distant and remote prospect, that to imagine even getting out of here is too much, means there is no urgency. Or at least no new urgency, everything about the dining room at StreetXO screams urgent. But not the weather warning. That’s a problem for the future versions of ourselves and they’re not here right now.

When we do finally exit the restaurant and its surrounding shopping centre, an arrangement even more bizarre now we’ve seen the inside of Dabiz Muñoz’s mind, the city is damp and deserted. The streets are quiet and it’s raining, steadily but not with the same drama and force imagined when you receive a warning sent to your phone.

But we are in the quiet within the storm. Elsewhere in the city and across the country rain is flooding the roads, the fire service is overstretched, they even cancelled the football! Later we try to walk around El Retiro when the rain has stopped and we find that too closed. The city of Madrid would like you to go home, please.

And so, eyes tired, ears ringing, but our bellies very, very happy, that’s what we do.

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