Marian Reguera

Service shaped the early framework of Marian Reguera’s career, beginning in 1992 as a hospitality team member at Expo del 92. That start was followed by time as a hotel and restaurant team member at Hotel Santo Mauro and Hotel Palace, where the discipline of the room sat alongside the demands of the dining floor. Further experience as a restaurant team member at El Arce and El Olivo added another layer of working knowledge across kitchens and service.

What built from those years was not a single style but an accumulation of instincts: how a room should move, how service should settle, how food can hold memory and precision at once. Since 2013, Marian Reguera has been owner and Executive Chef of Taberna Verdejo, drawing on that apprenticeship and the character of the houses she worked in to shape her own restaurant.

At Taberna Verdejo in Madrid, Spain, the cooking is seasonal and market-fresh, with a focus on salted delicacies, homemade marinated dishes, game, stewed dishes and offal. The house language is restraint and depth: ingredients are given room, while ancestral processes remain close to the plate. Instead of novelty, the kitchen works toward clarity, following the season and respecting the product. Escabeches and Jerez wines sit at the center of the house.

Marian Reguera brought escabeches into focus because of her personal history and because they were disappearing in Madrid, making them a defining feature at Taberna Verdejo. That decision gives the restaurant a practical relationship to preservation, with each dish carrying a trace of a larger tradition. Two named dishes show that approach clearly: gilda de codorniz en escabeche, associated with Reguera and the restaurant, and Escabeche de caballa on the menu.

Many dishes are cooked à la minute, with careful attention to doneness. Timing is treated as part of the work, not as performance, but as a way of meeting each ingredient at the right point. That precision is stated plainly in Reguera’s own words about stewing: “I have respected the ingredients. But I have taken into account each one's cooking times. So that the whole was well stewed. The line reads as method: measured, practical, and committed to balance.

Marian's signature dishes include Ahumados caseros (estilo Iñaki Camba). The dish fits her wider preference for familiar flavors handled with care, where smoke, memory, and technique meet in a register that is recognizably hers.

Marian's honors include Two Soles Repsol.