A tasting-menu restaurant that reads Cádiz's food history as a menu

Why Código de Barra is worth the booking

Código de Barra is the Michelin-starred room at Calle San Francisco 7, on one of the busy pedestrian streets of the old town. It is a tasting-menu restaurant with no à la carte, so this is an evening you plan, not a place you drift into after a plate of pescaíto frito. The restaurant calls itself a homage to the mark that successive cultures left on Cádiz's cooking, told through gastronomic innovation, and the two menus carry old names for the city's layers: Cotinusa and Erytheia.

The people behind it

The kitchen is led by Léon Griffioen, a Dutch-born chef settled in Cádiz. His wife, Paqui Márquez, runs the dining room and the wine as head of service and sommelier. Griffioen has also run the younger sibling Contraseña since 2020, so a food-led weekend can take in both. The restaurant counts itself the first Michelin-starred address in Cádiz city. Sources disagree on the year the star arrived, so treat any date you read with caution; the 2026 Michelin page still shows it.

The room

Michelin describes the room as calm, built from the oyster-stone (piedra ostionera) used in the city walls, brick and whitewashed walls, with small tables facing the kitchen. It is a considered, quiet dining room rather than a lively tapas counter, which suits a long menu and a conversation.

The menus and the price

The offer centres on two tasting menus, Cotinusa and Erytheia. Michelin files the cooking as modern and regional, and rates the price at its top band (€€€€). Published menu prices differ between reports and between years, and the restaurant's own menu names have changed too, so no figure is printed here: read the current price on the booking page before you commit.

If you want the produce behind this kind of cooking explained first, start at a plain bar and come here with a reference point. An independent reviewer found real technical skill in the kitchen but felt its ambition to impress outran its discipline, so expect a menu that is eager to show off rather than restrained.

Booking, hours and the cancellation rule

Reservations are made through the restaurant's website, which shows availability and adds you to a waiting list when the date is full. A credit card is taken to guarantee the table, and the restaurant's reservation policy applies a €30 per diner penalty to a cancellation with less than 24 hours' notice, so confirm the terms when you book. Michelin's 2026 page lists service Wednesday to Saturday, lunch from 13:30 to 15:00 and dinner from 20:30 to 22:00, with Monday and Tuesday closed. Older guides give a different pattern, so confirm days on the booking page.

History of the name and the address

The restaurant began in 2011, and the current room on Calle San Francisco opened in 2021 according to its own account. Its first premises were on the Plaza de la Candelaria, where Mare now cooks, so the two Michelin-starred rooms share a family tree as well as a city.