After the theft of Atrio, the Extremaduran restaurant run by chef Toño Pérez and his partner, José Polo, where in October 2021 some thieves stole thousands of euros worth of wine, now bad luck has fallen on Coque, Mario's Madrid restaurant Sandoval with two Michelin stars.
As reported this Tuesday, November 2, by his brother and his partner, Rafael Sandoval, on Sunday night they stole 132 bottles of wine, the combined value of which exceeds 200,000 euros.
Rafael Sandoval told about it this morning on the program
Espejo Público
, on Antena 3. There he explained that the assailants entered the premises (located for five years on Calle del Marqués de Riscal, number 11, where the old Archy nightclub was) through a hole they made in an adjoining room.
"Unable to do so, they went down a patio that we share with the pharmacy and broke the glass to enter the cellar," said the person in charge of the Coque cellar, which houses some 3,120 references and more than 30,000 bottles.
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The Police have confirmed to EL PAÍS that they are investigating the theft of a hundred bottles from the exclusive restaurant in the Chamberí neighborhood.
They affirm that, according to the first investigations, the authors of the robbery accessed through a pharmacy attached to the premises that is closed.
From one of the windows of this business they entered the premises through the back door of the restaurant.
"They went straight for the wine, there is no evidence that they took anything else," police sources indicate, which suggests that the authors knew perfectly well the value of those bottles.
The restaurant is closed on Mondays, so it was not until this Tuesday that the Sandovals became aware of the theft.
The interior of the Coque warehouse, in Madrid, in August 2020. KIKE PARA
Robberies of this type are usually made to order, and the gang responsible for the heist usually already has a market in which to place the loot.
The thieves broke one of the windows of the wine cellar to open the access door to it.
Everything indicates that they had carefully studied how to do it, because no alarm went off.
It is still unknown how many thieves entered Coque, but there were almost certainly several, due to the high number of bottles they took.
In his television interview, Sandoval wanted to take the opportunity to alert his colleagues in the sector to take maximum precautions, since they suspect that there is a specialized group of thieves in this type of high-value merchandise.
“We have vintages and verticals of all the most important wines in the world.
Obviously, many from Bordeaux: Le Pin, Petrus, Angélus, Mouton Rothschild”, sommelier Rafael Sandoval listed in a report published in this newspaper in October 2021. A space that he and his brothers affectionately call Don Ruinart, making a game of words with the famous
maison
de Champagne founded in 1729, since its cellar has a room dedicated to
champagnes —especially
those of Dom Pérignon—.
“When a vintage disappears that I won't be able to buy again, I get three new ones”, he continued explaining about his
modus operandi.
The Coque restaurant has three distinctions from the prestigious Michelin guide: two stars and a green star, a leaf-shaped badge that recognizes a restaurant's commitment to sustainability in the gastronomic field.
It is managed by the three Sandoval brothers: Mario, their celebrity chef;
Rafael, the sommelier, and Juan Diego, his head waiter.
It was in the summer of 2017 when they moved from the Madrid town of Humanes, where they had achieved their two stars earned with their twenty years of work, to the more than 1,000 square meters of a space that the Archy nightclub occupied in the 1990s .