Cauponor

Cauponor sits behind a door you'd walk past without knowing it was there, opening into a sandstone room with only five tables. That scale is the point: this is intimate, deliberate cooking from the team behind Peninsula, built as a choose-your-own tasting menu rather than a blind march of courses. You pick from roughly fifteen dishes, which puts control back in your hands without sacrificing ambition.

The kitchen earns that trust. Cured scallops swim in a raspberry habanero broth that shouldn't work and does. Pickled peppers come under salted whipped cream and a rose hot sauce, a combination that reads strange on paper and lands as genuinely inventive at the table. Black garlic octopus rounds out a menu full of ideas that feel specific to this kitchen, not borrowed from a template.

Presentation matches the ambition — these plates look as considered as they taste. It's an expensive night, priced per dish and meant for two, so this isn't a casual drop-in. But for an anniversary or any night you want the kitchen to work for you, Cauponor delivers something genuinely its own. The room is small, the ideas are not.