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Taste 1973 in GastroCanarias: we unveil our new dining room at Hotel Villa Cortés

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The Taste 1973 dining room with round tables dressed in white, mustard-upholstered chairs and a black tree-shaped column beside the window onto the open kitchen

Taste 1973, Arona’s first MICHELIN Star, unveils new dining room

By the GastroCanarias editorial team, 16 September 2026.

GastroCanarias has picked up on the unveiling of the new Taste 1973 dining room. We’re glad the Canarian magazine tells it putting the focus where it belongs: on shared work.

The new space was presented at the “GET TOGETHER · Todos somos EUROPE” gathering, the event held by the Gassmann family, owners of Europe Hotels International, with the group’s suppliers and partners. There, the refurbished dining room of the Hotel Villa Cortés’s fine-dining restaurant, in Playa de las Américas, was shown. GastroCanarias headlines its piece calling Taste 1973 “Arona’s first MICHELIN Star” — the assessment is the outlet’s own — and notes that the house also holds a Repsol Sun.

The refurbishment wasn’t born of an aesthetic whim. As the outlet explains, the room’s full refurbishment starts from what the guests themselves ask for: the space has been rethought to improve the diner’s experience and bring it up to the level of what comes out of the kitchen, without losing the restaurant’s identity. It’s the same approach we’ve worked with since we opened, in January 2019. GastroCanarias sums up well what kind of cooking we’re talking about: a signature cuisine that works with local produce from the island and draws on the history of Playa de las Américas. That work is what the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Academy of Gastronomy recognised with the 2024 Annual Award.

The article also gives credit by name: the dining room and the wine cellar are in the hands of sommeliers and maîtres d’ Aníbal Morales and Alberto Somoza.

In her remarks, Arianna Gassmann — chief operating officer and CEO of Europe Hotels International, according to the outlet — left a line that explains well the reason for the gathering: “Europe has been a family business for more than 50 years, but it has never been a story built by one family alone. No company builds itself alone.” At Taste 1973 we couldn’t agree more: behind a new dining room stand cooks, sommeliers, livestock farmers, fishermen and cheesemakers from Canarian gastronomy who have been by our side for years.

A cook works among pans on the Taste 1973 stoves, seen from the dining room through the open kitchen’s glass

The open kitchen of Taste 1973, on the other side of the dining room's glass. Photo: Instagram @1973taste.restaurant.

Read the full piece in GastroCanarias: Taste 1973, Arona’s first MICHELIN Star, unveils new dining room.

Taste 1973 receives the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Academy of Gastronomy's 2024 Annual Award

Diego Schattenhofer among the Revolutionaries of Spanish Gastronomy

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