• Jump to Julia Sherman’s favorite food and art from Spain’s capital.

RESTAURANTS AND BARS all over Madrid hand-paint the year of their opening on their facades: “Desde 1890.” “Desde 1920.” It is a point of pride for those custodians of tradition — whatever era they represent.

My first encounters with Madrid were colored by a similarly romantic, sepia tone. As a young artist, I made a pilgrimage to the Museo del Prado (desde 1819) to view the masterpieces of European painting. The museum is home to Dutch still lifes as well as the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” a Where’s Waldo of sixteenth-century perversions. I stood slack-jawed in front of Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Museo Reina Sofia (desde 1992), and I was a fly on the wall in chapels where people prayed in the presence of real-life Goyas. I stumbled into tapas bars where the menus hadn’t changed for upwards of 100 years.

Despite its rich history, the people, fashion, and contemporary culture and art keep Madrid in a state of laid-back evolution. Design studios lie hidden behind towering, regal wooden doors in prewar buildings with glass elevators and idyllic courtyards, and contemporary galleries summon crowds to their openings, exhibiting never-before-seen work among the crown molding of another era. The more I return, the more I realize that unlike Rome or Paris, Madrid holds the past firmly with one hand while keeping the other hand free to dream up something new. Madrileños don’t kill their idols, they toast them. The same can be said about their approach to food.

The concept remains remarkably fresh, which I can only attribute to Bonet’s underlying sense of humor and his increasingly relevant North Star: a restaurant is only as good as its raw materials, from the beef to the eel broiled at the table with a mini torch. Explaining the restaurant’s name, Bonet said, “the sala de despiece is the cutting room, where the animal is broken down after slaughter. We place ourselves at the beginning of the culinary journey, but in the end, this is an essentialist’s kitchen serving a product you should always recognize.” While the aesthetic is truly unique, Bonet is doing his part to represent what this town has always been about. “Ours is just an informal interpretation of the classic Madrileño obsession with quality.”

While Bonet is a long-standing celebrity in this town, Clara Diez represents the next wave of culinary thought leaders giving new context to the old way of doing things. Formaje, the gem of a cheese shop that she runs with her husband Adrián, is also her platform. Diez is your local queso doyenne and the most elegant advocate for and liaison between the consumer and best cheesemakers in Europe.

The other string of contemporary galleries worth hitting is on Calle del Doctor Fourquet, just southwest of the Parque de El Retiro. Conveniently, the galleries here coordinate openings, so if you’re lucky like I was, you can make a night of it, people-watching and gallery-hopping down the compact street. Don’t miss Helga de Alvear, Espacio Mínimo, and Galeria Hilario Galguera, where I saw a stunning solo show by the Belgian artist Peter Buggenhout. Grab a drink at the outdoor cafes in the plaza at the southern end of the street, or walk up Calle de Jesus to Cervezas la Fábrica, open from 12 a.m. to 12 p.m., serving every kind of pickled thing under the sun, and an arresting array of seafood bites, from mussels escabeche to boquerones with potato chips and a remarkable seafood salad.

For classic fare that tells a story, Casa Salvador is a local favorite and former bullfighters’ tavern that hasn’t changed a bit since its founding in 1941. The restaurant takes the theme to the nth degree, with salon-style portraits of bullfighters and painted bullfighting scenes covering the walls. The service is from another era, too, with waiters in bow ties and black vests, and tables cloaked in checked tablecloths. As someone who spends a lot of time food styling, the no-frills plating of old-school Spanish food comes as a respite — cod fish croquetas, huevos con patatas, flan, and the most straightforward sauté of green beans, pleasantly underseasoned in deference to the produce itself.

The tour begins in the grand main staircase, every inch of the walls painted in seventeenth-century trompe l'oeil murals by Juan Carreño de Miranda. The Infanta Margarita Teresa (you know, the one from Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”) peers out from a velvet-curtain-flanked balcony. Cherubs collect the blood of Christ on the ceiling, and, of course, there are large medallions of Saint Clare and Saint Francis to honor the patron saints. The upper cloister contains 15 chapels, each with their own articles of intrigue. My favorite relic is a life-size, bloody Christ by Gaspar Becerra, laid prone on a sepulcher. This wooden sculpture has a gaping wound in its side to store the consecrated host, so one must reach inside the torso to take communion. (Book ahead, as English-speaking tours are very limited.)

In keeping with the grandeur of the Habsburg Dynasty, I recommend following your tour of the convent with lunch at Lhardy, a restaurant and tea parlor founded in 1839. It would be easy to pass by this institution without taking a second look, as the street is bustling with tourists in the downtown Barrio de las Letras district. But your curiosity will be rewarded. The parlor floor offers tea service with traditional French pastries like marron glacé and macarons. Champagne sits expectant, chilling in baroque silver ice buckets, and warm pastries rest in a steam-heated silver vitrine fit for a queen. If you’re craving a snack on the savory side of life, you’ll notice the crystal pitcher of ice-cold gazpacho, oysters à la carte, and seafood salad in the vitrine.

While this is a fantasy setting for an afternoon snack, the real excitement is reserved for those in the know, up the winding staircase, past stained-glass windows and vitrines of royal glassware and porcelain serving pieces. Through somberly lit hallways, you’ll find a series of small private dining rooms ideal for a party of six to eight. Or make a reservation for the main dining room to step back in time to the belle epoque. Lhardy is fine dining as a total work of art, with red velvet curtains, gleaming crystal, a cheese selection on wheels, and consommé poured from a classic silver samovar.

Now that you have experienced the way the other half dine, turn to Palacio de Liria for the ultimate house tour. The palacio offers a time capsule of Spanish aristocratic history with the Nosy-Nancy intrigue of poking around the current home of the 19th Duke of Alba (we indeed peeped him ducking into his chauffeured car as we arrived). The original palace was built in the 1770s, burned to the ground during the Spanish Civil War, and then painstakingly rebuilt in 1956. The larger-than-life Duchess of Alba, born in the Palacio in 1926, was the most titled aristocrat in the world, a lover of flamenco, and a wife three times over, her most notable nuptials being those to a Jesuit priest eight years her junior. But I digress.

Seeing as the Palacio is still in use, surprisingly mundane contemporary family photos are almost as fun to ogle as the traces of ye olde aristocratic life: ornate porcelain perfume vessels in the shape of women’s legs, or a collection of macerinas — porcelain and silver cups with especially stable saucers specifically designed to cradle hot chocolate. A renowned collection of miniature paintings can be found in the Goya and Spanish Rooms, and portraits by a who’s who of the masters like Zurbarán and Titian build out the dense narrative of Spanish aristocratic lineage in pictures — all earning the Palacio its nickname, “the mini Prado.” (Be sure to book your tour ahead, as spots are limited and spoken for in advance.)

For a more elaborate sit-down meal in Salamanca, restaurant Hermosilla is a modern sunlit Italian eatery that balances out the habitual Spanish carb load with ambitious vegetable preparations. Blush-pink polished plaster walls and pine wood furniture give the space a light contrast against the hearty food — pasta, wood-fired pizzas, and bold seasoning on a wood-fired fish with shaved pineapple (in the vein of an al pastor). Eggplant is sliced paper-thin and fried until light and crispy, amid pillowy clouds of mozzarella cheese.

For a late-night scene, there’s always the classic Bar Cock, where you might catch a glimpse of Almodóvar having a martini in his usual spot. For the newer end of the spectrum, there’s the recently opened Los 33 from the Uruguayan restaurateur Nacho Ventosa and his wife, Sara Aznar. The food is simple: meat and sandwiches cooked over an open fire. The design is rough-hewn minimalist chic with vintage leather Darro lounge chairs by Paco Muñoz, tall ceilings, and a hand-carved tropical wood communal sink in the bathroom that I took more photos of than any of the food on this trip. Late at night, Ventosa spins records and the dancing takes over.

Of all the things Madrid represents, what I love most is how one can still be a flaneur here, and a well-fed one at that — now, forever, and beyond. I guess I’ll just have to come back.