What Is a MICHELIN Green Star, and What Has to Change in a Kitchen to Get One

Short answer first: a MICHELIN Green Star is a distinction for sustainability, not for cooking. The MICHELIN Guide introduced it in 2020 and El Invernadero has held one since that year, alongside its star for the food. Two symbols, two separate questions. So what is a MICHELIN Green Star really measuring? Not whether dinner was good.

That distinction gets lost constantly, so it is worth setting out clearly, and then explaining what the sustainability side actually looks like in a working kitchen — the part that never appears in a press release.

One symbol for the cooking, another for the sustainability

The stars — one, two or three — are about the food on the plate: ingredients, technique, consistency, personality. Nothing else. A restaurant can be immaculate on that front and have no Green Star at all.

The Green Star sits apart. It flags restaurants whose way of working is built around sustainability: how they source, how they treat produce, how they manage what is left over. It is not a fourth star, it is not a ranking, and it does not come in levels. You either appear with the symbol or you do not.

The practical consequence is that the two can exist independently. There are Green Star restaurants without a star for the cooking, and starred restaurants without a Green Star. When a house has both, as happens here, it means two different assessments landed positively — not one prize with a bonus attached.

What the MICHELIN Green Star is meant to recognise

We are not inspectors and we will not invent the guide’s internal criteria. What the guide states publicly is that the symbol highlights restaurants committed to sustainable gastronomy, and that inspectors take that commitment into account as part of their work.

What we can talk about is the substance behind the label, because that is the part we live with. In practice, the conversation about sustainability in a restaurant kitchen tends to circle around a handful of hard questions:

• Where does the produce come from, and who grew it?
• What decides the menu — the calendar, or what is genuinely at its best right now?
• What proportion of each ingredient reaches the plate, and what happens to the rest?
• How much water, energy and packaging does a service consume?
• Does the team understand any of this, or does it live in the head of one person?

None of those questions is answered by a single decision. They are answered by hundreds of small ones, repeated every day, which is exactly why they change how a kitchen is organised.

What has to change in the kitchen

The first change is the order of decisions. In a conventional kitchen, a dish is designed and then the ingredients are hunted down to fit it, whatever the month. Reverse that and the produce arrives first: what is ready, in what quantity, for how many weeks. The dish is built afterwards. That single inversion is the most demanding thing about the discipline, because it means the menu is never finished.

The second is the definition of the word “ingredient”. A vegetable is not just its most obvious part. Stems, leaves, skins, tops and trimmings all have culinary uses, and a kitchen that takes sustainability seriously has to find them rather than describe the rest as waste. Fermentation, drying, stocks and preserving stop being creative flourishes and become part of the daily routine.

The third is supply. Buying seasonally and locally where possible means fewer suppliers, closer relationships and far less anonymity in the delivery. It also means accepting that a crop can fail, that a producer can have a bad week, and that the kitchen absorbs that rather than the grower.

The parts nobody sees

Guests notice the plate. They do not see the store cupboard, the bins, the paperwork or the shift handover, which is where most of this work happens.

Separating and reducing waste, controlling energy and water use, cutting single-use packaging, keeping records so that decisions can be checked rather than assumed: it is unglamorous, and it takes time from people who already have a service to run. It also has to survive staff changes. A practice that depends on one chef remembering it is not a practice, it is a habit waiting to disappear.

That is the honest cost of the symbol. Nobody hands it over for good intentions, and holding it is not a one-off achievement — it is a way of working that has to hold up next Tuesday too.

Does a Green Star mean the restaurant is vegan?

No. The Green Star has nothing to do with whether a menu contains animal products. Plenty of restaurants with the symbol serve meat and fish; the question is how they work, not what they cook.

In our case the two things happen to overlap, because the kitchen here is built on vegetables — the gastrobotánica approach Rodrigo de la Calle has worked on for years, where the vegetable is the centre of the dish rather than the accompaniment. That makes some of the sustainability work more natural and some of it harder. Easier, because a vegetable-led larder is closer to the season by definition. Harder, because when a vegetable is the main event, there is nowhere to hide a mediocre one.

How to read it in the guide

If you are checking a restaurant before booking, the two symbols appear separately in the MICHELIN Guide listing. The star tells you about the cooking. The green clover tells you the house has been recognised for its sustainability practices. A restaurant showing both has been looked at from both angles.

It is a useful filter, but not a promise about your evening. The Green Star will not tell you the format, the length of the meal or the price — and those are usually the things that decide whether a booking is the right one.

Seeing it at the table: prices and formats

For the record, so nobody arrives with the wrong expectation. We serve set menus only, with no à la carte option. Vegetalia is €158 per person and Gastrobotánica, the omnivore option, is €168 per person. Both exist in an Experience version with drinks pairing, at €218 and €228 per person respectively. Meals are long, and that is intentional.

Bookings are handled through our booking system on the restaurant’s website, and there are Green Experience gift cards if you are booking for someone else. If you have a question about dates, timings or what a menu involves before you reserve, write to us and we will answer you directly.