Luis Bollo
New Haven, Conn.

Category: fine dining

Concept: Ibiza is a contemporary Spanish restaurant that innovates from tradition. The flavors are authentic. If I were to do a dish that worked here but not in Madrid or Barcelona, that wouldn't be Spanish food.

Menu challenge: One of the fish difficult to find here is bacalao (salt cod) the way we get it in Spain. The salt cod you get here is salted the old fashioned way, for a month. For Americans, you have to desalt it a lot and then the flavor is gone. You can make croquettes with it, but you can't serve a whole piece of codfish like we serve in Spain. But the fresh cod here is incredible so I'm salting it myself: 12 hours in salt and another 10 hours in fresh water. If there's one fish that's better here than in Europe, it's the cod.

Menu misses: The only thing I have difficulty with is tripe, or something with blood, or small birds. You can have morcilla (blood sausage) as a special but not on a daily basis. I have it on the menu because the people who like it love it. Everyone likes the tripe after trying it, but they don't try it. I prepare it with Biscayne sauce: with crispy bacon, crispy chickpeas, tomato, choricero peppers, onions, apples, white wine, a piece of ham and bread. I sell about four portions a night, out of 120 or 150 covers. I am doing it for the people who love it. And they come with others, to maintain the dish.

Wine list: It's all Spanish wine. I'm doing a cuisine that matches with those wines and trying to elevate my cuisine to the level of the wines. We've got to show people what we have in Spain, show them the quality of our gastronomy. I see a big change from five to 10 years ago: Americans know a lot about Spanish wine now. We have no sommelier but we have two people with extensive knowledge of wine, and we are trying to bring in the smaller bodegas. Our house wine is always good wine. That for me is very important.

One great idea: The idea to have high-quality food, well presented by professional waiters, in a casual kind of place—it shocks people in a good way. Ibiza is not like a classic, really serious place where you have to focus on the food. We want to show the warm hospitality of Spanish food—to do high quality for less money. If we have to make less money, I'm still happy because we're doing something good for our country.

What customers remember: Diners receive an amuse-bouche—a small gazpacho, small omelet or small shellfish croquette. And before they leave, they have a mignardise, like a small chocolate shake with coconut gelatin on the bottom, Spanish madeleines or white chocolate truffles in a spoon.

Operational challenge: Doing better every day. We want to maintain the prices, but do things better and better. I have three Spanish chefs out of a team of 11 cooks—just for dinner. In order to focus, we had to close for lunch.

It took me years to understand American customers. The proportion of carbohydrate is different here. People want vegetables. The American customer is not just about protein. I'm trying to do things that customers don't expect but that will be received in a good way. For instance, they might not like a spoonful of olive oil on a dish, but they would like an olive oil sorbet. So we do a salpicon, a seafood salad served with yellow tomato juice and olive oil sorbet.

"I understand tradition as a continuous evolution of a country's gastronomy. Today's tradition was yesterday's innovation."