Celler del Tossal Restaurant and Winery

Perhaps we could say something like “From the creators of Rodamón de Ruzafa, comes the Celler del Tossal” — but really, it’d be more true to say the opposite. Although we wrote about the former a couple months ago, that was actually Luca and Marta’s second culinary venture. Their first, in the difficult year of 2012, was Celler del Tossal, a restaurant located in the middle of the Carmen neighborhood, in Valencia.

They’re both distinct but with a star ingredient in common: “the caring the whole team puts into making what we like best,” Luca told us. With Celler, the Catalan word for winery, she was looking to climb the rungs with respect to previous culinary offerings. Now, they still have their legendary rices, all sweet, certainly — but they’ve add a wide array of wines as a basic tenet of the restaurant, local and not local, including natural wines that have placed them among the leading wineries in Valencia.

Andreu and Héctor are the other two protagonists of Celler del Tossal, those who every day and every night wave the baton in the kitchen and never stop innovating with a clear goal: win over the customer with their concept of contemporary cuisine. Ingredients turned up to 100, but with technique and constant evolution.

What can we find on their menu? At lunchtime, the sweet rices, but also the Valencian seafood dish fideuà, whose flavor is a result of the bases they prepare in a traditional way. Rice on one side and hot charcoals on the other, which give a unique flavor to their meats and fish that come directly from Valencian markets.

We go with some of the appetizers and main courses: Pléiade Poget oysters, marine fideuà with Codium algae; pickled raïm del pastor, a Valencian plant, with prawn mayonnaise; burrata cheese with salted mullet fish; turbot and bonito; or beef cannelloni with grated romero cheese. And for dessert? Ask for the mandarin orange sorbet with caramelized biscuits, the horchata French toast, or the French cheese board, for example.

Before we leave, Luca reveals one of the most closely guarded secrets of Celler: the Roman aqueduct that goes through the winery’s basement, which they dream of converting into a “wine-duct” for all the fans of their star beverage. We’d love to see it with our own eyes, but more so to enjoy it with our own palates.