Nobu Just Opened in Madrid, and It’s Worth Knowing Even If You’re Not Staying There

Madrid’s hotel and restaurant scene keeps adding names that used to only show up in bigger, flashier cities, and the biggest one this year is Nobu.

Nobu Hotel and Restaurant Madrid opened in the Cortes district in September, the fifth Nobu property in the world. It’s a three story restaurant space with fifty rooms and suites attached, a rooftop bar, and the same Japanese Peruvian menu Nobu Matsuhisa built his name on, the black cod, the yellowtail with jalapeño, the kind of food that used to mean a trip to LA or Tokyo to try.

You don’t have to be staying there to eat there, and that’s the part worth knowing. Nobu restaurants generally take reservations from anyone, hotel guest or not, which means it’s a real dinner option for a Madrid trip even if you’re staying somewhere else entirely.

It’s not the trip for younger kids. It’s a fine dining price point and a quiet, dim, adults paced room, closer to a special occasion dinner than a family meal. If you’ve got teenagers who already like sushi and would get a kick out of a proper Nobu meal, or if part of your Madrid trip is a night out for the adults while grandparents or a sitter covers bedtime, this is the kind of splurge worth building in on purpose rather than stumbling into by accident.

Expect Nobu dinner pricing similar to what you’d pay in New York or Miami, a main course easily thirty to forty euros and sharing plates on top of that, so budget it as a real splurge rather than a casual Tuesday dinner. Reservations are already moving fast for the first few months, so if a Nobu dinner is going on the calendar, book it as soon as your dates are set rather than waiting until you’re in the city.

Nobu isn’t the only new name in the neighborhood. The Hoxton opened this year too, in a 19th century building right on Plaza de Santa Ana in the Literary Quarter, 192 rooms with a rooftop bar and an Italian trattoria downstairs. Different price point, different feel, more of a design hotel than a fine dining destination, but it’s another sign of how fast Madrid’s hotel scene is filling in with names that weren’t there five years ago.

There’s also Club Metrópolis, a nineteen room boutique property that opened on Gran Vía inside the historic Edificio Metrópolis building, built around a private members’ club model with its own restaurants built in. It’s a different kind of new, small and exclusive rather than big and flashy, and another sign Madrid is pulling in hospitality concepts that used to live only in London or New York.

What this tells me for planning purposes is that Madrid’s food and hotel scene is diversifying past the classic Spanish tapas bar and family run pension image a lot of people still have of the city. That’s good news if you want variety on a longer trip, and it’s also a reason to plan a couple of splurge meals or nights deliberately instead of letting the trip default to the same style of dinner every night.

If a splurge dinner or a specific hotel stay is part of what you want out of Madrid, that’s a conversation worth having early, since the newest, most talked about spots book up fast once word gets around. My Madrid guide covers more of what’s worth planning for ahead of time versus what you can figure out once you arrive.