Tenerife Restaurant Best New Opening Unveiled at Awards

Deep red placemats curve across a wooden table shaped like molten rock cooling mid flow, chopsticks resting beside small black dishes flecked with orange and crimson glaze. On the wall above a banquette, three framed images glow with the texture of fire and stone, red streaks bleeding across black canvas. This is Lava, inside the Gran Hotel Taoro in Puerto de la Cruz, and this quietly intense dining room now carries a title reaching far beyond Tenerife's own shores, Tenerife Restaurant Best New Opening.

A Tenerife restaurant has been selected as the only Canary Islands nominee in a national competition to find Spain's best restaurant opening of 2025. Lava is among 41 restaurants selected for the fifth edition of the TheFork Awards, putting Tenerife alongside some of Spain's most highly regarded new gastronomic projects.

Selected by Michelin Starred Judgement

The shortlist wasn't simply chosen by the booking platform. A jury comprising 56 Michelin starred chefs selected their favourite openings from 2025, with the nominees representing 14 autonomous communities across Spain, a selection process that carries genuine culinary weight rather than relying on booking volume or user reviews alone.

The public now gets the final say, with voting open until 11th October. The restaurant receiving the most votes will win the People's Choice Award for best opening of 2025, succeeding last year's winner, The Library in Madrid, a title that placed considerable prestige on whichever restaurant claims it next.

A Concept Built Around Fire and Restraint

Behind Lava is chef Erlantz Gorostiza, whose new Tenerife project focuses heavily on cooking over fire and charcoal while showcasing quality ingredients, with particular attention paid to local produce. That commitment to open flame cooking, rather than more conventional kitchen equipment, gives the restaurant a distinct technical identity within an increasingly crowded field of new Spanish openings.

It is also a deliberately intimate restaurant. Lava has capacity for only 18 diners, creating a very different experience from a conventional large restaurant, one where every table remains within close reach of the open kitchen's heat and smoke.

A Chef's Table at the Heart of the Kitchen

Within the kitchen itself is a chef's table for six guests, allowing diners to watch dishes being prepared around the grills and experience the cooking process at close quarters. That proximity transforms dinner into something closer to live demonstration, diners watching flames rise and fall as each course takes shape only a few feet away.

The concept uses traditional ingredients and techniques as its starting point before applying a contemporary approach, with fire forming the central theme running through the menu, a philosophy that treats an ancient cooking method not as rustic novelty but as the organising principle behind an entirely modern dining experience.

What Recognition Like This Means for Tenerife

For Tenerife, the nomination provides another piece of national recognition for an increasingly ambitious restaurant scene, one that has spent recent years steadily building a reputation beyond the island's more familiar tourist dining circuit. Full coverage of the awards and Canary Islands business news is available on the official Canarian Weekly website.

That kind of national visibility matters considerably for an island whose culinary identity has historically been overshadowed by mainland Spanish cities with longer established gastronomic reputations, giving Tenerife's dining scene a genuine platform in front of judges and diners who might otherwise never consider it.

Competing Against Spain's Culinary Heavyweights

Competition will be considerable. The 41 nominees are spread across 27 Spanish cities and 20 provinces, representing an extraordinarily broad cross section of the country's evolving restaurant landscape. Catalonia has the largest representation with nine restaurants, followed by the Valencian Community with six and Madrid with five, while the Basque Country has four nominees, and Andalusia and Murcia each have three.

The Canary Islands, by comparison, has just one, making Lava Tenerife's sole representative in the competition, a distinction that places considerable weight on a single restaurant's performance in representing an entire archipelago's culinary ambitions.

Public Voting Decides the Final Outcome

Unlike a conventional industry award determined solely by judges, however, the ultimate People's Choice result is decided by public voting. Voting opened on 14th September and remains available until Sunday 11th October, meaning Tenerife residents, previous customers and anyone supporting the island's restaurant scene can participate before the winner is announced.

That public dimension transforms the competition into something closer to a community campaign than a purely professional accolade, giving locals a genuine stake in whether Lava's recognition translates into an actual win rather than simply a nomination.

A Ceremony Still to Come

The awards ceremony will take place at Madrid's Gran Teatro CaixaBank on 16th November, when another nine restaurants will also be recognised as finalists, closing out a months long process that began with chef selected nominations and will end with public votes tallied on a national stage. Broader challenges facing Europe's restaurant industry continue unfolding alongside stories like Lava's, a contrast visible in recent coverage of France's ongoing wave of restaurant bankruptcies, where economic pressure has hit hospitality businesses considerably harder than the recognition Lava now enjoys.

A Small Room With a Large Flame

Whatever the eventual result, being selected by a panel of Michelin starred chefs puts a Puerto de la Cruz restaurant among a relatively small group recognised as noteworthy new additions to Spain's restaurant scene. For eighteen diners at a time, seated around a table shaped like cooling lava, watching smoke rise from a fire that has become the entire philosophy of the room around them, the recognition already changes very little about the meal itself, only who now knows to come looking for it.