Few buildings are more photogenic than Madrid’s Metrópolis. Situated in the Centro district, where Gran Vía meets Calle de Alcalá, within walking distance of the Four Seasons and Nobu, it features a Beaux-Arts façade and gilded dome that have been part of the cityscape since 1911. Federico Coullaut-Valera’s statue Winged Victory, which crowns the building, is a relative newcomer—installed in 1977—but it has nonetheless spent nearly half a century presiding over one of the best addresses in town. For all its architectural swagger, the building has spent much of its existence as corporate office space.
Enter Marta Seco and Sandro Silva, the husband-and-wife restaurateurs behind the wildly successful Grupo Paraguas and Amazónico. In 2019, when the building’s owners, the insurance company Metrópolis Seguros, asked them to open a restaurant on the ground floor, they responded with admirable ambition: Why settle for one floor when you can have seven?