Deliranto

Chapters set from the pass

The first bites leave the Cook & Travel gastro-bar before the table is fully claimed. Josep Moreno, chef at Deliranto in Salou, builds the meal as a sequence of chapters, with contemporary cooking carrying the mood as much as the flavor. His role here is authorial and bench-side: founder, head chef, and the person holding the restaurant’s story-led method in motion from service to service.

Moreno’s published lineage is not a list of masters or schools. The restaurant makes a different kind of ancestry visible, drawn from Lewis Carroll, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Frank Baum, Charles Dickens, and Michael Ende. Those names sit less like decoration than mise en place. They give the kitchen permission to use altered logic, tenderness, peril, innocence, and staged encounter as working materials. At Deliranto, a tasting menu is not arranged as a neutral procession of plates. It is built for anticipation, pause, texture, temperature, and sensory shift, with the guest moved through a tale rather than simply fed course by course.

The menu changes three or four times

Change is part of the discipline here. Deliranto’s themes shift three or four times a year, with menus tied to works and worlds such as The Fable of Orpheus, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and The Little Prince. The format begins away from the main table, continues through bites in the kitchen, and then settles into the dining room, where starters and main courses arrive as scenes within the same composition.

The house works in short and long tasting formats, and the standard menu is 13-15 dishes paced over 2.5 hours. The effect depends on control as much as invention: a sphere that reads as an olive but carries ricotta, jalapeno, tomato, and balsamic; soup made in the form of a book; squid presented through the logic of a treasure chest; lychee held for the final register. These are not tricks when the sequence holds. They are gestures with timing. Moreno uses contemporary technique to serve the tale, letting the plate do the narrative work instead of asking language to carry it alone.

A small room with theatre in its bones

The room at Deliranto is intimate, with only a few tables and a modern, eclectic atmosphere shaped for concentration. The pass, the counter, and the dining room each take a turn in the service. Projections, dimmer private areas, staff choreography, and chef interaction make the meal feel staged, but the better word is conducted. Movement matters. So does restraint.

Salou is a tourism-driven city, and Moreno also works beyond his own kitchen as president of Associació d'Empresaris d'Hostaleria (AEH) de Salou. That second role places the restaurant inside the wider hospitality life of the coast without softening its own point of view. Deliranto holds 1 Michelin star and One knife from The Best Chef Awards, but the daily measure remains smaller and more exacting: whether the next chapter lands with the precision of the Cook & Travel gastro-bar.