4 days ago
This Uniquely Catalan Luxury Hotel Puts Priorat On The Wine Travel Map
Gran Hotel Mas d'en Bruno at dusk
Michellle Chaplow
Deep in Catalonia, in the wine-soaked heart of Priorat, there's an ambitious fine dining restaurant inside a luxury hotel that's cooking without tomatoes, without potatoes and without peppers or chilis of any kind. Obviously, this poses a challenge for any kitchen in Spain.
But it's a challenge that makes sense for Gran Hotel Mas d'en Bruno, which just celebrated its second birthday. Although the hotel does everything well enough to have landed in Relais & Châteaux from its very beginning, it's not doing anything the easy way. Rather, it's been doing things slowly, carefully, by hand and always with respect for tradition and history.
That strangely limited menu is a fully realized homage to the past. Chef Josep Queralt and his team at the hotel's Vinum restaurant took a deep dive into the medieval Llibre del Sent Sovi, which is the earliest surviving recipe book in Catalan, dating from 1324. That's about two centuries before explorers landed in the New World and brought back some of the crops that are now cornerstones of Spanish cuisine.
Bruno's Bar
Courtesy of the hotel
Queralt isn't the first Spanish chef to explore this idea—Paco Morales has been diving deep into Andalusian history in Córdoba, for instance—but his choice holds extra relevance now. In 2025, Catalonia has the distinction of being a World Region of Gastronomy, remarkably the first European area to hold the title. And while some of that honor reflects the modernist cuisine coming out of Barcelona and beyond, Queralt's backward-looking approach is worthwhile: Dishes like conger eel loin with a sauce of smoked fish bones and almond, or grilled stuff partridge in a sauce of fresh herbs and mustard seeds, offer delightful bites of gastronomic time travel.
To be sure, Vinum is still serving its 21st-century menu, in omnivorous and vegetarian formats. There are also tapas-style plates at Bruno's Bar (hand-sliced Iberian ham, anchovies from the Cantabric Sea, toasted bread with tomato and D.O.P. Siurana extra virgin olive oil), and a separate lunchtime menu of local fare (sea bass tiradito with green olives, creamy ganxet bean hummus with savory candied pork belly) at the poolside Tarraco that caters to contemporary tastes.
Everywhere, the sommeliers pair dishes with wines from Priorat, an up-and-coming DOQ region known for its robust, powerful reds, and beyond. Rather than producing its own wines, the hotel works with many of the 106 wineries in the region, serving their vintages in the restaurants, selling a wide selection of their bottles (on commission) in the boutique and organizing tours to visit the nearby wine cooperative or small producers.
The Lobby
Michelle Chaplow
Other tours take guests to explore the area, including the beautifully decaying Carthusian monastery of Santa Maria d'Escaladei (which offers a seriously impressive VR tour) and to impossibly picturesque hilltop villages with views for miles and miles. Don't be surprised when someone calls Priorat the Tuscany of Catalonia.
One could be forgiven for imagining that that nickname came up in marketing meetings for the hotel. Mas d'en Bruno is part of the Stein Group, a privately owned firm that specializes in the development, restoration and management of a few dozen boutique hotels in (mostly southern) Europe. This helps explain the budget that went into renovating the hotel's historic buildings, which were once also a monastery and then later a private residence.
The renovation, which combines Catalan heritage with modern niceties, is the work of the Barcelona design firm Astet Studio, a group that's known for some of the sexiest dining rooms in Marbella. For their work on Mas d'en Bruno, they were recently honored with a Hospitality Design Award in the category of Restoration, Transformations + Conversions.
A suite
Courtesy of the hotel
The designers blended the historic essence of the original stone masonry with contemporary materials like natural stone and pale oak. A burgundy color palette reminds you that you're in wine country, and a recurring motif of arches is a nod to the original facade. The rooms in the original building have a good amount of variation—the best suites have grand arched windows, wooden-beamed patterned ceilings and double-sided fireplaces—while a new wing contains ten identical garden suites, which makes it a good choice for groups. (Well, almost identical: The one at the far end of the building has a private little pool.)
In both areas, the rooms' furnishings, from the coffee tables to cocoon-like headboards, are curved, a reference, general manager Jordi Compte Stevens surmises, to the sinuous geometry of Priorat's landscapes. It's another case where there might have been an easier way of doing the expected luxury hotel things, but the creative minds behind Mas d'en Bruno committed to going all-in on giving it a sense of place.
