THE REASON AND THE STORY
Before it became La Casa de Manolo Franco, it was Casa Manolo.
Manu’s life has always been connected to the restaurant his parents built with dedication, love and hard work from 1969 onwards. For decades, that house was both the family’s workplace and home. It was where Manu and his sisters grew up, surrounded by kitchens, tables, customers and stories that would eventually become part of their own memory.
But that place was much more than a restaurant. It was his family’s home, but also the home of an entire village: the bar where neighbours, friends and generations came together, shared a table and shared their lives. It was where Manu learned, almost without realising it, a way of understanding hospitality, hard work and the importance of gathering around a table.
Today, that memory lives on in the name. Manolo Franco was Manu’s father and the person to whom this house originally belonged. Bearing his name is a way of keeping alive what began in 1969 and, over time, took on a new form.
It is not about repeating that story, but about continuing it in a different way: recovering what was learned at home, reinterpreting that legacy and transforming it into a new way of understanding gastronomy.
La Casa de Manolo Franco
Located in the heart of Valdemorillo, a village in the Sierra de Madrid, La Casa de Manolo Franco is now a new chapter in that family story. A place where memory is not preserved as something static, but transformed and allowed to keep growing.
People come here to eat, but also to pause, discover and share. To put their phones away, breathe, look around and allow time to unfold differently. To be present. A house created to experience gastronomy from a close and personal perspective, where what matters is what happens around the table.
Cooking a legacy also means building something new. And it is from this perspective that a gastronomic experience with its own identity emerges.
A way of understanding gastronomy that invites you to slow down, to feel and to enjoy the moment. Because, in the end, a home is also a place where time is experienced differently.
The couisine
The culinary philosophy of La Casa de Manolo Franco revolves around four essential elements: flavour, history, beauty and emotion.
It tells the story of a place and a way of experiencing it through a distinctive, refined and creative cuisine, rooted in the land and the seasons, with local produce from the Sierra at its heart. Thyme, rosemary, lavender, rockrose, oak, pine… are among the flavours and aromas that give Manu’s creations their distinctive character.
Through three gastronomic menus, Manu presents a series of courses that invite guests to spend a day in the countryside, recreating a day in the Sierra through his dishes. An experience that changes with every season, inviting guests to discover the landscape through flavour, memory and imagination.
The surroundings
Valdemorillo is a mountain village of more than 14,000 inhabitants, with sixteen residential developments surrounded by the natural landscape of the Sierra de Madrid. Set within a privileged natural environment, it forms part of the Regional Park of the Middle Course of the Guadarrama River and its surroundings.
The village lies along the historic Imperial Route and has its own distinctive heritage, including the Church and the former ceramics and glass factory, now converted into the Casa de Cultura.
It is just ten minutes from San Lorenzo de El Escorial, five minutes from Villanueva de la Cañada, and around twenty minutes from towns such as Las Rozas, Majadahonda and Boadilla del Monte.