Mater Terrae

Mater Terrae is the restaurant at Terra Dominicata, in a separate building of the restored Carthusian farmhouse a kilometre and a half below the Cartoixa d'Escaladei. The room is built around a floor-to-ceiling glass wall of the cellar — three hundred references from DOQ Priorat and DO Montsant, lit from behind, kept the way the rest of the house keeps things. Fran López — chef of Xerta in Barcelona and Villa Retiro on the Ebro, both with Michelin stars — directs the kitchen.

“

A Priorat dining room that ends at the cellar, and a Priorat menu that begins in the vineyard outside the door.

”

The kitchen reads the property. The estate olive oil, the herbs from Montsant, the vegetables from the kitchen garden, the pasture and orchard within an hour's drive. Where the cooking is contemporary the technique is from Fran López's starred kitchens — pollen, pickle, low-temperature treatment — but the dishes themselves stay close to Catalan tradition: rices, the Mediterranean peix and carn, the artichokes when they are right. The wine list is Priorat-and-Montsant first, and the estate's own wines (Domus Aquilae, Garnatxa Peluda, Macabeu) come straight from the cellar across the wall.

There are three rooms to eat in, and a fourth in summer. The green-panelled dining room holds the tasting menu in communal arrangement. A second, more intimate room takes the round tables and the fireplace at night. The wine wall is the formal lunch room. In summer the pergola opens, and most of the long midday lunches happen there — striped banquettes, woven cane shade, the long view to the olive groves and the slate slopes of the valley.