Óscar Molina
13 years in the kitchen of Ibiza Gran Hotel has put Barcelona-born Óscar Molina and La Gaia restaurant on the map for food-lovers around the world. After consolidating his cuisine and receiving numerous awards – including two Soles Repsol – the kitchen team at Ibiza Gran Hotel has decided to go one step further: “we want our clients to have the best breakfast they could ever imagine, have a lunch made from first-class zero-mile produce by the pool and, to finish, enjoy a tasting menu at La Gaia, which is out of this world,” explained Molina. Ibiza Gran Hotel offers a unique gastronomic experience in Ibiza that has been designed to win over the most demanding diners.
Costa Mara Restaurant: the most complete and surprising breakfast in Ibiza.
Vanity Fair magazine described the morning offerings at Ibiza Gran Hotel as being “the best breakfast in the world”. And with good reason. Óscar Molina’s team know that there’s nothing better than starting the day by satisfying your appetite with exactly what you fancy. Ibiza Gran Hotel views breakfast as “the best cover letter” and has worked year after year to perfect its assisted buffet until it has become a truly unmissable experience for any lover of good food who visits the White Island.
Costa Mara
This year, as part of its constant search for improvement, Ibiza Gran Hotel has fitted out its famous breakfast with the latest technology: a new kitchen set for show cooking; a (properly cooled) extensive deli and cheese station where guests can order slices of their favourite cheeses and cured meats; the bakery, with over 20 different types of freshly baked bread; and the pancake station. Zero-mile jams, a honeycomb, freshly chopped fruit, eggs whichever way you like them, fresh fruit juices, a cereal and dried fruits bar, home-made desserts, hand-made bonbons, Cinco Jotas ham, gluten-free products... Enjoy it all in a relaxing and elegant setting. Breakfast at Ibiza Gran Hotel fulfils your deepest and most unexplored desires.
The Pool Restaurant: sustainable and zero-mile with a Mediterranean flavour
Bringing the most authentic essence of the Mediterranean to the pool at Ibiza Gran Hotel was Óscar Molina’s aim for this season and he decided to “make life a bit more difficult” by trying to create a fine dining project in a relaxed setting like the Pool Restaurant. And the result? An experience that combines the character of the best beach restaurants in a totally Ibizan atmosphere. The menu changes depending on the fish and seafood that are sold at Ibiza market each morning. The product is the star, and the client decides how they would like it cooked: grilled Mediterranean mussels or in marinière sauce; grilled or tempura XXL scarlet shrimp; red Ibizan prawns in carpaccio with arbequina olive oil or salt, or the catch of the day: grilled, salted or Bilbao-style. The Pool Restaurant at Ibiza Gran Hotel offers its guests the most select Mediterranean products and the privilege of choosing how to enjoy them.
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Pool Restaurant
“The Pool Restaurant is the big foodie development of 2021 at Ibiza Gran Hotel. We’ve created a totally new restaurant and taken great care with the dining room and the diner’s experience from start to finish,” explained Óscar Molina. You can whet your appetite with freshly baked bread and focaccias served with a different aperitif every day, and each detail at the restaurant has been carefully curated. Once you’ve taken your seat at the Pool Restaurant, you’ll be taken on a journey through the most iconic flavours of the Mediterranean coast. The restaurant pays tribute to the location of Ibiza Gran Hotel, and fish and sea food in every form.
The sea at the Ibiza Gran Hotel pool
Zero-mile produce and sustainability are the two key aspects of the food at the Pool Restaurant. Molina and his team have achieved these aims by being in constant communication with local producers and distributors. “We have to move away from the stereotype of a hotel restaurant with an unchanging menu. A fixed menu doesn’t give you the flexibility to adapt to the best seasonal produce. When clients come to the Pool Restaurant in July, they’ll eat something different to those who come in September. Because that’s what the market has. We have products in Ibiza that we can be really proud of: figs, watermelon, fish... But we don’t have them all year round and our job is to change as they do,” explains Molina.
La Gaia: Mediterranean Kaiseki
Mediterranean Kaiseki are the two words Ibiza Gran Hotel uses to define the food served at La Gaia: haute cuisine with a strong Mediterranean character that is influenced by two ancient cuisines: Japanese and Peruvian. La Gaia is the most cherished restaurant at Ibiza Gran Hotel. The cherry on the cake of a foodie experience that starts with breakfast at Costa Mara Restaurant, continues with the zero-mile Mediterranean flavours of the Pool Restaurant and ends by taking a sublime gastronomic journey for dinner. The ingenuity of chef Óscar Molina – who is familiar with the food laboratories of renowned chefs including Gastón Acurio and Mitsuhara Tsumara– has inspired him to replace the raw materials in traditional recipes with local produce, creating an original series of signature dishes.
La Gaia
This year, La Gaia is offering diners the chance to take two gastronomic journeys. The first is called ‘Tanit’ and is a tasting menu of eight of the most emblematic dishes in the history of the restaurant. It’s perfect for La Gaia newbies who can sample the restaurant’s greatest hits. The second tasting menu at La Gaia is called ‘Posidonia’. It consists of 12 new dishes and the menu is based on seasonal produce so it will keep on changing to pay tribute to the best products the island has to offer in each season of the year.
This year, La Gaia has two tasting menus: ‘Tanit’, eight of the most emblematic dishes in the history of the restaurant, and ‘Posidonia’, with twelve new dishes using seasonal produce.
Both menus fuse Oriental and Mediterranean flavours and are influenced by the Japanese kaiseki tradition, making dinner a truly all-encompassing ceremony for the five senses. Molina and the La Gaia team have designed a truly unique gastronomic experience by delving into the local environment: Ibiza and the Mediterranean Sea, creating the perfect symbiosis between haute cuisine and artistic expression.
