CEBO

Two La Manchuela hands at the Madrid pass

From the pass at Hotel Urban, Javier Sanz, head chef and co-founder of Oba-, and Juan Sahuquillo, chef with Grupo Cañitas, direct CEBO in Madrid. Both come from Casas-Ibáñez in Albacete, where their work grew through Cañitas Maite Gastro and Oba- before reaching this room on Carrera de San Jerónimo. Sanz was born in 1997 and earned Madrid Fusión's Revelation Chef award in 2021. Sahuquillo, his lifelong friend, helped turn the family business into a wider gastronomic group, with Oba- opening in January 2022 and earning a Michelin star and Green Star within 10 months. At CEBO, their task is not to transplant La Manchuela whole into a hotel dining room, but to carry its discipline into a more formal Madrid frame. The restaurant had an earlier life under Aurelio Morales, who held its Michelin star from 2018 to 2022. Sanz and Sahuquillo took on the address after that period, and CEBO regained a Michelin star in the 2024 Michelin Guide. The lineage here is therefore visible but not nostalgic: Albacete producers, vegetable-garden thinking, small national suppliers, a Madrid hotel room, and two cooks who prefer product to ornament.

Thirteen steps, seventeen when the season asks

CEBO works through tasting menus rather than choice at the table. The CLASSIC menu runs to 13 steps; the SEASON menu extends to 17. Those numbers matter because the cooking depends on accumulation, not volume: a croquette with ham, a line-caught squid, smoked tomatoes with goat cheese, black Andalusian baby squid, creamy rice, beef from working cattle, quail treated ortolan-style, or smoked caviar placed with enough space around it to be read. Sanz and Sahuquillo use fermentation in their wider practice, but at CEBO the published method leans toward clarity: low-temperature cooking when time gives texture, immediate heat when a product needs edge, and sauces built to support rather than cover. The beef shank is cooked for 24 hours. The famous ham croquette comes from the Cañitas orbit and won World's Best Croquette at Madrid Fusión in 2021, but on this pass it sits inside a broader Madrid sequence, not as a trophy. The kitchen's vocabulary is modern Spanish fine dining, with La Mancha and the Cabriel valley close to the hands.

A quiet room around the work

The room gives the pass room to breathe. Tables sit with generous spacing, the lighting stays low, and the geometry of the hotel setting is softened by warm woods. A curated wine program moves beside the menus, drawing on Spanish and international bottles without making the cellar the subject of the meal. The counterpoint is useful: seafood, caviar, tomato, rice, offal, working-cattle beef, then the glass chosen to hold the line. In a city full of louder rooms, this one keeps its voice down. The final impression is not of hotel polish alone, but of a kitchen trying to make each step legible, from the 13-step CLASSIC menu to the 17-step SEASON menu at CEBO.