I’ll admit it, I have never once looked at a supermarket tomato and wondered where it grew up. Filandón, a restaurant tucked into the woods of El Pardo on the edge of Madrid, wants to fix that habit with architecture. At its entrance sits a glass greenhouse used as a farm shop, selling the vegetables the kitchen cooks with. Every crate of potatoes and string of dried chilies comes from the restaurant’s own farm. You can eat the menu, then buy the menu, which is honestly a great business model.
Barcelona-based Trenchs Studio designed the structure, borrowing its silhouette from the classic European glasshouse, with an aluminum frame, pitched glass roof, and decorative cresting along the ridge. Founder Ricard Trenchs has spent the better part of two decades designing restaurant interiors. Here, custom bronze pedestals outside hold baskets of produce and can be rearranged as the seasons change. Inside, a wood-and-stone table serves as a counter and guides shoppers through the space without a single interior wall. The produce travels from Granja de los Monjes, the owners’ organic farm in northwestern Spain’s El Bierzo region.
Designer: Trenchs Studio (Ricard Trenchs)
Filandón is an old Leonese word for the winter gatherings when villagers sat around the fire to spin thread and swap stories. It comes from the Latin filum, meaning thread, and León’s writers still stage literary filandones in its honor. The restaurant’s connection to León extends to the García Azpiroz family behind it, whose roots trace back to the muleteers of the region’s Maragatería area. Diners can now walk out with the same tomatoes and peppers that landed on their plates an hour earlier. Doggy bags have officially been upgraded.
The produce comes from Granja de los Monjes, roughly 240 miles (385 km) northwest of Madrid by road. The name translates to “the monks’ farm.” The family bought Granja de Santullano, a 12th-century monastic grange in San Esteban de Valdueza long tied to farming and winemaking, and is regenerating about 148 acres (60 hectares) there. Restoration crews even found an 18th-century wine cellar hidden beneath the old buildings, which is the most Spanish renovation surprise imaginable. Tomatoes, potatoes, piparra peppers, artichokes, lettuce, and asparagus grow there organically. The harvest supplies the group’s Madrid restaurants, and the greenhouse lets diners carry some of it home.
The group in question is Pescaderías Coruñesas, founded in A Coruña in 1911 to bring seafood to Madrid. It runs El Pescador, O’Pazo, and Filandón, and in 2021 it rescued Lhardy, a Madrid institution dating to 1839, from insolvency. The greenhouse shelves also carry Pescaderías Coruñesas preserves alongside Lhardy’s liqueurs. Petersham Nurseries in London combines a greenhouse, restaurant, and store on one property, while Amsterdam’s De Kas grows produce in the same glasshouse where you eat. At Filandón, the glasshouse is the shop, while the growing happens 240 miles away.
The silhouette recalls the 19th-century European glasshouse, with its cast-iron frame and plate glass built to shelter exotic plants. Here, the frame is slim aluminum in a dark olive finish that blends with the trees of Monte de El Pardo, one of Europe’s best-preserved Mediterranean forests. Gooseneck lamps glow above the doors, and dried chili ristras hang inside the frame. The bronze pedestals out front display what’s for sale before you reach the door. Glass has one big weakness in Madrid, though, and it’s the sun.
Trenchs addressed that with alicantina blinds, the wooden slats strung on cord that hang outside windows across Alicante, Valencia, and Murcia. They roll up on a simple pulley, shade the glass, and let air slip between the slats, all without a motor. Architects around Spain have been reviving them as a low-tech way to limit heat gain. Here, olive-green wooden blinds stretch across the greenhouse roof. They can be adjusted throughout the day and across the seasons to help keep the shop usable year-round.
A dark herringbone timber floor runs through the interior, and an oak unit in a warm tobacco tone lines the back wall, displaying preserves and bottles under focused lighting. Ceramic lamps with linen shades sit on the stone-topped table like it’s someone’s living room. The effect is a jewelry store for vegetables, with tomatoes getting the spotlight usually reserved for watches. Trenchs once described the challenge of an all-glass Barcelona restaurant he designed as giving a transparent space its own identity and narrative. At Filandón, the produce gives shoppers plenty to look at. I suspect some diners will leave wondering, for the first time, where their tomatoes grew up.