FDJ Score: 9.5/10 (Three-Star Level, upper range)
Review
A dinner at Casa Marcial starts long before the first plate, usually with a drive.
The restaurant sits in the Asturian hills near Arriondas, well outside the usual circuits of urban fine dining. Asturias Airport is around 100 kilometres away, and the final stretch narrows into country roads, past scattered houses, wet greenery, and slopes rising on either side. You do not pass Casa Marcial on the way to somewhere else. You set out for it.
The distance does something useful. It slows you down, and it puts the achievement of Esther and Nacho Manzano into relief: their family restaurant took its third Michelin star in the 2025 Spain guide and holds it again in 2026. When we visited in June 2026, it was still the most recent Spanish house to reach that level, since the 2026 guide promoted no new three-star restaurants.
We stayed at Narbasu, the family's hotel 14 kilometres away. It is a historic country house with its own rooms and a very good restaurant, almost a prologue to the Manzano world before the main event. Lunch there was Asturian in the fullest sense: fabada, croquettes, wild chicken. The croquettes in particular stayed with me. As it turned out, we would meet them again that evening.
Location & Atmosphere
Casa Marcial stands more or less alone on a narrow rural road. The house is more than 130 years old and has been renovated with notable restraint. It hasn't been turned into a museum of rustic charm, and it hasn't been gutted in the name of design either; instead it has been made calm, usable, and quietly contemporary.
Our table faced a large window. Early on there was only landscape: slopes, fields, the dark edge of Asturias beyond the glass. Then the evening arranged itself around the house. Mist began to drift through the view, less a backdrop than a presence, softening the hills until the dining room felt suspended somewhere between shelter and weather. The restaurant never pushes this, but the connection to the land outside is clearly deliberate: Casa Marcial doesn't simply cook Asturias, it listens to it.
The room had the assurance of a mature three-star without the stiffness that sometimes comes with it. Service was excellent throughout, and the sommelier in particular gave the evening its precision. He was knowledgeable and well-timed, present when an explanation helped and gone again afterwards.
Culinary Style
We chose the Nordeste menu, named for the northeastern wind. The menu describes that wind as something that clears everything in its path, strongest in the places the kitchen loves most. The kitchen then treats it almost as an ingredient: a force that dries fish, roe, and cured meats before carrying them into broths, sauces, and other preparations.
In less disciplined hands the conceit would stay decorative. Here it works as structure.
The menu runs from sea to mountain, from the Vega and the orchard, along rivers and streams, up toward the summit of Mount Pienzu, where the rugged coast and the Picos de Europa can be seen together. Its section titles read like weathered notes: tradition, purity, cliff, pasture, river, spring, humidity, ferns, fresh water, fat, silkiness, salt, smoke, cider, milk, home, childhood.
There is little conventional luxury here. The cooking is built around place, technique, and family memory, and around the tension between rustic origin and serious refinement. It has real depth, but rarely asks to be admired for its effort; dishes tend to look simple at first, then reveal how much has been folded into the gesture.
Menu / The Dishes
The meal opened with the creamy ham croquette "Casa Marcial," a family recipe and one of the house signatures. We had eaten the same croquette at lunch at Narbasu and immediately ordered a second portion. It returned here with the same quiet force: fragile outside, almost liquid within, deeply savoury without weight. More than any biography could, it explains what a family restaurant is.
I was served together with fried corn with scrambled egg, blue cheese, and onion, a dish that Nacho Manzano was already cooking, we were told, at the age of fourteen. You can taste that origin. The corn brings sweetness and warmth, the egg softens everything around it, the blue cheese cuts back with Asturian sharpness, and the onion ties it together with its own sweetness. Sentimental it is not; this is memory rendered exactly.
The Cantabrian seafood stone arrived with grilled shrimp, percebes, oyster, and warty venus clam. The percebes were extraordinary, with that rare concentration of cold Atlantic water, iodine, resistance, and sweetness. They tasted less like an ingredient than a message sent straight from rock and tide.
A celery curd with seaweed, cucumber, and sheep-sorrel granita changed the register: cooler, greener, almost a corrective after the shellfish, the granita lending acidity and lift while the seaweed kept everything tethered to the coast.
Leaves and shoots with curd cheese, mint, and tomato carried that freshness further, the orchard turning up as substance rather than as garnish.
Tear peas with hake kokotxas in pil pil and mushroom showed a different side of the kitchen. At the base sat guisantes lágrima, small, fresh, and crisp enough to burst as you bite them. Over them came the kokotxas, the gelatinous cut from beneath the hake's chin, cooked slowly in olive oil and garlic until they release the gelatin that emulsifies into pil pil, a glossy sauce built from the fish itself. Raw mushroom on top, and more worked in below, cut the richness. A small composition, but it carried the logic of the whole menu: land and sea folded into a single thought.
The trout with the aroma of its habitat, spring juice, and yeast was, for me, one of the evening's most intelligent dishes. Rather than isolating the fish, the kitchen rebuilt the place around it: water, vegetation, fermentation, freshness, a faint shadow of the riverbank. Delicate, but never fragile.
Bonito with Iberian ointment, salt, and vegetable flan brought more density: the fish firm and clear, the Iberian fat adding warmth, the flan softening the whole so it never turned too forceful.
The squid with black bean mole and its ink was among the strongest things we ate. A small squid came first, almost on its own; then the mole followed, with cubes of squid folded in. The sauce reportedly carries more than thirty ingredients, and it tasted like it: dark, smoky, marine, earthy, concentrated without ever becoming confused. It recalled the idea of a Spanish black rice without imitating it, which made the pairing with Dassai 23 sake genuinely clever. The sake supplied the rice note the plate implied, aromatically and texturally rather than literally, and gave the composition a frame it would otherwise have lacked.
A white bean stew with limpets was one of the most distinctive plates of the night. Beans and shellfish are both humble, in different ways, and together they turned unexpectedly precise, the firm, saline resistance of the limpets set against the softness of the stew. Asturian, without tipping into folklore.
Kale juice with pork, chard stems, and razor clams kept that conversation going between garden, animal fat, and sea, with the razor clams sweet and snapping and the greens bitter and mineral.
Steamed red mullet with nasturtium flower and roasted carrot was gentler but no less considered: red mullet can dominate a plate with its particular intensity, and here the steam and the carrot's roasted sweetness reined it in while the nasturtium added a peppery, floral lift.
The roast beef with pine nuts, butter marinade, and pine oil was the most straightforwardly pleasurable course. The pine wasn't there for decoration. It gave resin, warmth, and a forested aroma around the meat, placing it firmly in the mountain stretch of the menu.
Then the stewed "Pitu" in the style of the chef's mother, with Asturian escanda pasta filled with its giblets. This was sensational. Pitu de Caleya, the traditional Asturian free-range chicken, isn't prized for bland tenderness but for flavour, structure, and the memory of rural cooking; here it was stewed until butter-soft yet kept its character, the spelt pasta and giblets deepening it without weighing it down. Refined, with the maternal centre the title promises left intact.
The desserts began with butter ice cream, cider vinegar, and croissant, the dairy richness given a clean edge by the vinegar.
A meadowsweet tartlet followed, delicate and aromatic. It was served together with cereal skin with fresh cream, which pulled the palate back toward milk, grain, and childhood texture.
Cream with kefir toffee, goat yogurt, and a kefir-and-oxalis ice cream brought lactic depth and acidity.
The most Asturian of the desserts was the baked apple with cider mother cream, apple ice cream, and cider press, where cider was treated as culture rather than as a flavouring.
The meal closed on crispy corn "Fayuela" with salt and a honey gummy. Corn, salt, honey. After a menu this long and intricate, the simplicity felt almost like a return to where it began.
Wine
We took the wine pairing at 130 euro alongside the 270-euro menu. It leaned heavily Spanish without being confined to Spain, and it held the length of the evening together with unusual coherence.
It opened with a traditional-method sparkling cider from Emilio Martínez, exactly the right beginning. Asturian in spirit, precise enough to belong at this level, and a preview of the role cider would play throughout the meal. The L'Assemblatge 2003, 2014, 2015 from Mestres was outstanding, mature and complex, giving breadth without overwhelming the food, the seriousness of long-aged sparkling wine carried by a clear Spanish identity. A Domaine Cottenceau Montagny 1er Cru La Moullière brought a note of Burgundy, fresh and controlled, bridging the more saline, green, and lactic moments of the menu.
The Dassai 23 alongside the squid and black bean mole was the most memorable pairing of the night, completing the dish by suggestion rather than by matching its intensity, its polished rice character echoing black rice with no rice on the plate. Later, the 2022 Macán Clásico gave the meal a different kind of gravity. A Tempranillo from the Benjamín de Rothschild and Vega Sicilia project in Rioja, Macán Clásico is conceived as the more immediate, fruit-driven and delicate expression alongside Macán itself, oak-aged for structure while keeping freshness and fruit at its core. It suited the room: Spanish, polished, unshowy, with enough backbone for the meat courses and without breaking the line of the meal.
Verdict
Casa Marcial was one of the finest three Michelin star dinners I have eaten anywhere in the world.
What stayed with me afterwards wasn't a single dish, though several were exceptional. It was the consistency of thought from one end of the menu to the other. The evening held together, from the first croquette to the last honey gummy, and every course seemed to know where it came from, why it belonged there, and how far it could be refined before it lost its origin.
There is something almost improbable about a restaurant of this calibre developing in a place this remote. And yet, having eaten there, the remoteness stops looking like an obstacle and starts looking like a precondition of its truth. Casa Marcial could not be this restaurant anywhere else. The road, the hillside, the old house, the mist at the glass, the cider, the shellfish, the beans, the Pitu, the family memory: all of it is part of the meal.
It is not a convenient restaurant. You have to travel for it, plan around it, and accept that the experience belongs to Asturias rather than to your schedule. But for any diner who treats gastronomy as culture, landscape, and emotional memory, it offers a rare completeness.
For my own notes, I place the evening at 9.5, not as a mathematical verdict but as a clear marker of how exceptional it felt. Casa Marcial is world-class not in spite of its isolation, but because it has worked out how to turn isolation into identity.
Location: Arriondas, Asturias, Spain
Chef: Esther and Nacho Manzano
Michelin rating: ★★★ Michelin
Visited: June 2026
For another outstanding Spanish restaurant in a completely different region, read my 2026 Aponiente review.