Calma y Caos sits at the northern edge of Palma's centre, on Carrer d'Antoni Marquès, right next door to the Rivoli cinema. The name is the whole idea: calm and chaos, classical precision on one side, an unchecked appetite for experiment on the other. The house calls itself a restaurant of cocina de autor, signature cooking, and here that is not an empty label. Mallorcan and Iberian ingredients meet techniques borrowed from Japan, the Middle East and Latin America, without collapsing into generic fusion.
The rooms began life as a pastry shop. Before the cooks arrived, the Pastelería Rívoli baked here, and later the Forn Can Segura from Muro ran a branch at this address. More has survived of that past than an anecdote.
Two rooms, two moods
Strictly speaking these are two restaurants under one roof. At the front you are received in an elegant room with dark red accents, muted and built for eating slowly. Behind it lies the former bakehouse: tiled, plain, with the old oven simply left where it stood. Many of the implements the bakers left behind were not thrown out; Iván Crespo and Carlos Hubert worked some of them into pictures and set others on a wall shelf. That is how the room the house itself describes as steampunk came about — the chaotic half of the name, while the calm lives at the front.
The kitchen at Calma y Caos
Most people eat their way through a menu here. The house runs a whole series of them, with telling names from Empezar con Calma through Mar en Calma to Caos Desatado, plus one version that stays with meat and one that stays with the sea. The menus are ordered for the whole table, with a wine pairing if you want one. If you would rather choose for yourself, the same dishes are there individually.
It opens with the Buen comienzo: house-baked breads with homemade aiolis, among them sea fennel, seaweed and paprika, alongside seasoned butters. Then it gets specific. Takoyaki the way this house makes it, with octopus, a caramel of Pimentón de la Vera and soy caviar. Duck gyoza with a barbecue built on Japanese whisky. Croquetas of blue cheese and caramelised onion on piquillo hummus. Stuffed roast potatoes, one filled with bacon jam and crisp smoked panceta, the other with a cream of Galician spider crab and sea fennel.
The main courses keep the same handwriting. The cochinillo, acorn-fed Iberian suckling pig, arrives with a reduction of red wine and cherry and its own crackling skin. The beef cheek is braised long at low temperature, wrapped in a crisp casing and gratinated with a mild mustard cream and mushrooms. A venison stew sits inside a tartlet. The John Dory is worked into a baklava-style roll with Iberian ham and Mallorcan picada, the cod is cooked three times and gratinated with sea fennel alioli, almonds and a rice-nori crisp, the gilt-head bream roasted in the oven on tomato with oregano. At the close there is a cheesecake, a game played across several chocolates, and a mojito you eat with a spoon.
The cooks and their sourcing
Iván Crespo and Carlos Hubert have known each other a long time and had already run a kitchen together years earlier, as the chef team of a golf club restaurant on the island. Crespo cooked outside Palma for years before looking for a place in the city where he lives with his family. He lives near the Santa Catalina market, and the walk there is part of the job: whatever catches him there ends up on the menu. Part of his supply comes straight from producers, much of it from Extremadura, the region he is from, some of it from his own relatives.
The wine list stays compact and sets Mallorcan bottles beside growths from mainland Spain and a few international references. For larger parties the house lays on menus of its own.
