Myo, Madrid: The Hand Roll Bar Everyone's Booking in Chamberí
In a quiet corner of Chamberí, Plutarco have engineered a permanent sunset over a hand roll bar, and built the perfect excuse for a Madrid escape whatever the season.
Photography, Plutarco, MYO Restaurant, Madrid. By Pablo Zamora.
Madrid's light has always been part of the sell, that high, dry glow the Spanish call the golden hour. At Myo, the city's newest hand roll bar, the studio Plutarco decided not to wait for it. They built their own, and left it switched on for good.
The bar sits raised on an oak platform, finished in a green so deep it reads as nori seaweed, with a stainless-steel counter capping the top where spotlights pick out each roll as it lands. Above it all runs a continuous amber gradient in backlit fabric, a fixed dusk that owes nothing to the weather outside. It is, Plutarco say, the moment the bar stops being furniture and becomes the room's main event.
A Room Built Like a Still Life
What makes Myo worth crossing Madrid for is how deliberately unfinished everything around that glow feels. Exposed piping and raw stainless-steel sit close to the bar, cold materials left cold on purpose, so that once the lights come up they catch the amber wash and turn, as Plutarco put it, into an explosion of warmth. It is a trick lifted from photography rather than architecture, using surface to hold light rather than simply reflect it.
The palette was never abstract. Plutarco pulled it straight from the menu: the seaweed green of the platform, the orange red of salmon and tuna, a cooler blue standing in for white fish. That same logic runs through Irene Girona's graphic identity, so the branding and the build read as one continuous idea rather than two separate briefs handed to two separate studios. It is the kind of coherence that Condé Nast Traveller readers will recognise from the best boutique hotels, where the story is told in materials long before a single word of copy appears.
Seeing Without Being Seen
Behind the bar, a metal shelving unit does double duty as both storage and room divider, quietly steering guests towards the entrance and the bathroom while shifting character under the light thanks to an artwork by Fuensanta Sobejano. Nearby, a wooden frame filled with translucent yellow glass screens the kitchen, hinting at the movement behind it without ever fully revealing it. Plutarco call this seeing without being seen, and it gives Myo a sense of theatre without a single dramatic gesture.
Founded by Ana Arana and Enrique Ventosa, Plutarco take their name from the Greek biographer with a talent for a well told story, and the reference feels apt. This is a studio whose portfolio runs from a thirteen square metre creperie to a full hospitality fit out, and whose instinct for colour as structural material rather than decoration has become something of a signature across their Madrid work.
A City Break That Doesn't Wait for Summer
Myo trades as a Day and Night bar, meaning the same room does two distinct jobs. At lunch it runs bright and brisk, suited to a quick counter seat between meetings or gallery stops in Chamberí, one of Madrid's more residential, less touristed pockets, closer in spirit to a neighbourhood than a postcard. By evening the lighting settles and the room turns moodier, more suited to lingering.
That flexibility is precisely what makes Myo a useful anchor for a Madrid trip outside the obvious summer window. The city's famously punishing August heat is not a factor here, since the whole point of the room is a light source that answers to no season. A weekend in February gets the same engineered sunset as one in July, which is no small thing for a destination often sold purely on outdoor terraces and long, warm evenings.
The format itself, temaki eaten by hand at a counter, folds neatly into Madrid's existing bar culture, where standing, grazing and conversation already do most of the social heavy lifting. Myo simply gives that culture a Japanese vocabulary and a Spanish soundtrack and lets the two sit together without friction.
For anyone building a case for Madrid as a year-round city break rather than a summer one, Myo makes a persuasive opening argument. Chamberí itself rewards slow mornings and long lunches, and a seat at this bar, golden hour guaranteed, is as good a place as any to start one.
Myo is a Day and Night hand roll bar in Madrid's Chamberí district, designed by Plutarco.
The concept centres on temaki, hand rolled sushi eaten at the counter.
The interior features a permanent backlit sunset above an oak and stainless-steel bar.
Photography is by Pablo Zamora and the graphic identity by Irene Girona.
The restaurant trades from lunch through late evening, with the mood shifting from bright to moody as the day turns.
Photography, Plutarco, MYO Restaurant, Madrid. By Pablo Zamora.
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