Slow & Low Barcelona trades its Michelin star for tapas

Slow & Low Barcelona, Frank Beltri's one-Michelin-star restaurant at Carrer del Comte Borrell 119, will serve its last tasting menu on 17 October. Beltri announced the closure in a video on Instagram this week; the company keeps Bar Canyí, its tapas bar a minute's walk away.

“After a long period of reflection, we have decided that Slow & Low will close its doors as a gastronomic restaurant,” Beltri said. The reason he gave Hule y Mantel is arithmetic rather than fatigue: “We don't have the number of customers we need to be profitable.”

The restaurant opened in 2018 on the Sant Antoni edge of the Eixample and won its star in November 2022. The room is built around the kitchen: two counters facing the open pass, a dining room of five tables and a chef's table, according to Guía Repsol, which lists the seafood-led tasting menu at €140. Infobae puts it at around €150 per person.

The star stays on the wall until 17 October; the queue has already moved to the tapas bar.

Why Slow & Low Barcelona is closing

The numbers that work are round the corner, on Carrer de Sepúlveda. Bar Canyí opened there in autumn 2024 with a counter menu of bomba de la Barceloneta, calamari sandwiches, cap i pota and oxtail rolls. Beltri told Ara the bar serves more than 3,000 customers a month; to Hule y Mantel he put the figure at up to 4,000.

“People want to go out for dinner, but they prefer to do it five times with a 24-euro ticket than just once,” he told Ara. At 43, he told Hule y Mantel, he now thinks about “businesses that can be more profitable. But you never know.”

The Instagram message was explicit about what survives: the Slow & Low company “will carry on at the helm of Bar Canyí, serving traditional tapas, and with new projects we are about to announce”. One of them, Beltri said, is another informal place built on sandwiches, music and vinyl.

After Oria and Teatro Kitchen Bar

Beltri founded Slow & Low with chef Nico de la Vega, who left the project in 2025 and has since opened Maíz Maíz, a Mexican street-food address in Sant Antoni.

It is not the city's first starred closure since last autumn. Martín Berasategui's Oria, in the Monument Hotel, closed in October 2025, and Teatro Kitchen Bar shut in December 2025, a year after winning its star. In Paris, Bruno Verjus has announced that Table, with two stars, will close in December. The price bracket is not empty everywhere: Glovers Alley reopened in Dublin with a €155 menu this week.

The last tasting menu leaves the pass on 17 October. A bomba at Bar Canyí cost €7 in its first months, according to Hule y Mantel.