Dr Stravinsky co-owner and general manager Cesar Montilla. Photo / Uzo Onyejiaka for the Washington Post
Margarita Sader scooped the coffee-flavoured bubble out of a cylinder and placed it on the edge of a cocktail.
The helium-enhanced creation was a palate cleanser, she explained, so guests should slurp from the sphere after taking a sip of the drink made with smoky mezcal, bittersweet amaro, and hibiscus-infused vodka.
“We wanted to make a cocktail that could fly,” Sader told the table.
At Paradiso, a moody bar in the El Born neighbourhood, the wood-slat ceiling, green-glass light fixtures, and fibreglass palm fronds give off the air of a quirky aunt’s rec room. Nothing suggests the carnival-level eccentricity of the drinks until Sader, a co-owner, and her staff begin their performative service.
Two years ago, the World’s 50 Best Bars put Paradiso at the top of its prestigious list, the first time any bar outside London or New York had scored the prize. Then in 2023, Sips, another Barcelona bar, clinched the top spot.
An international crowd is flocking to the city to work at these high-level bars - or just drink at them - making Barcelona a new hub of imaginative cocktails.
Travellers to Barcelona have never been at a want for mixed drinks, but the institutional venues are now described as classic cocktail bars, bastions of hospitality where service is prim and the drinks are familiar.
Restaurants similarly towed the line for decades, taking cues from traditional Mediterranean chefs. Then mega-chef Ferran Adria took over El Bulli in 1986, and his modernist influence continues to reverberate. Some see the prestige for bartenders as an inevitable outcome of Barcelona’s thrilling culinary evolution.
“Gastronomic culture made people curious, and as more people came for that, more bars were able to open and offer that same level of drinks,” said Cesar Montilla, co-owner and general manager of the inventive cocktail bar Dr Stravinsky.
It’s also hard to miss the influence of the city’s artistic legacy on bartenders, what with Dali, Picasso and Gaudi all having nurtured their creativity here. These bars are just a few places that exemplify their ambition:
The ghosts of Barcelona’s native sons Antoni Gaudi and surrealist painter Joan Miro seem to loom large at Paradiso. Each cocktail at this neo-speakeasy - which you enter through a refrigerator door in a pastrami shop - tells a chapter of a larger story.
The bar introduces a new thematic menu annually. This year’s, “Mysteries of the World”, dropped in March. Sader and her husband, co-owner Giacomo Giannotti, and a team of bartenders and designers created the drinks over a year of intensive research in the bar’s lab. Each drink represents an age-old head-scratcher, from Atlantis to UFOs to gravity itself.
Ramses, a vermouth-based cocktail mixed with a medley of fruity ingredients, arrives in a pyramid-shaped vessel with a pistachio-marshmallow garnish shaped like a pharaoh’s head.
On a spring visit, the showstopper represents the biggest mystery of all: the human brain. The Enigma, a fruity and sour concoction built on pine-cone-infused vodka, is delivered in a head-shaped ceramic vessel. The bartender removes the crown to reveal a gummy-like raspberry-and-pine garnish shaped like a brain. Smart.
Cocktails starting at 12 euros ($21); Carrer de Rera Palau, 4
Batuar sits at the top of a marble staircase in the posh Cotton House Hotel, which opened in 2015 in a landmark 19th-century building that formerly housed the Cotton Textile Foundation headquarters.
The serene setting and neoclassical details of the airy bar belie the cocktail menu, which features madcap variations on classic cocktails, devised by bar manager Alberto Melis, a Paradiso veteran.
His negroni, for instance, is reimagined with Spanish tapas in mind. He infuses the mixed drink with cooked green peppers using an ultrasonic cleaner, a toaster-size machine typically used to polish metals with bubbles produced by high-frequency sound waves. The combination of vegetal smoke and Campari’s bitterness delivers an unexpected but completely logical flavour.
His daiquiri is similarly deceptive - and delightful. The traditional rum-sugar-lime recipe gets a modernist spin with a clarified lime cordial instead of citrus juice.
“We can change the texture and technique without changing the taste,” he says while presenting a drink that’s as clear as a martini, yet tart as a daiquiri.
Cocktails starting at 14 euros ($25); Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 670
The restaurant at the Monument Hotel has been awarded three stars by Michelin inspectors for applying French culinary techniques to Catalan ingredients.
The bar team should also be judged by a theatre critic, because it injects serious drama into each cocktail, whether you visit for a multi-course feast or an a la carte appetiser before hitting the town.
Their stage? A wood bar cart with oversize wheels. But first, a quick consultation.
Josep Espunes Pastor arrived shortly after a plate of burrata and blue lobster ravioli surrounded by champagne foam. He asked about drink preferences and disappeared, only to return wheeling the bar cart to the table.
He assembled and stirred my drink with surgeon-like focus, finishing each step with a subtle flourish, enough to remind you that even in a formal setting, cocktails should be fun.
“Here’s a classic old-fashioned with a touch of celery bitters,” he said. “Sometimes I make it with cacao bitters, but that’s better for a different moment. All guests and all moments are unique.”
The moment was very different after the meal. He returned to shake an espresso martini mixed with rum, to match the Caribbean origin of the coffee, and Mozart Dark Chocolate Liqueur, for a soupçon of sweet.
Cocktails starting at 25 euro ($45); Carrer de Mallorca, 259
In 1609, Galileo Galilei discovered that the moon is covered in mountains and craters. At the bar named after the Florentine scientist, Italian expat Andreas Civettini reminded me that craters can be caused by meteors.
In the Krater, the “meteor” is a liquid-nitrogen-dipped (read: smoking) square of Nutella sponge cake. It sits in an indentation on the lid of a dark-grey, coarse-surfaced ceramic vessel.
Remove the lid to reveal a radical twist on an espresso martini that involves a coffee and banana-juice cold brew, vodka, and a salted-caramel and miso foam. The flavours flickered across my palate like a shooting star.
The telescope-shaped menu is a compendium of winking tributes to Galileo’s discoveries.
The effervescent Galilei, a gin-fizz-meets-paloma, is served in a glass that evokes the thermometer he designed. The Sunlight is a spectacle with burnt orange pieces on a dense cube of ice that suggest sunspots when the drink is delivered on a LED-lit coaster.
Cocktails starting at 10 euros ($18); Carrer d’Aribau, 152
Bartenders at Sips work on an island in the middle of a cavernous room, bringing a refreshing level of accessibility and space to modernist cocktails.
The drinks station offers 360-degree views of machines that whip cream into a stiff peak for the espresso martini and generate edible soap bubbles full of rosemary foam for a fantastical rendition of the porn star martini, a modern classic made with passionfruit, vanilla, and bubbly.
Sips co-owner Simone Caporale is an Italian expat who oversaw the celebrated drinks progrmme at Artesian in the Langham hotel in London. His business partner, Barcelona native Marc Alvarez, managed the drink programmes for El Barri, the restaurant group run by famed chef Ferran Adria’s brother, Albert.
Little surprise, then, that science plays a role here. But the staff doesn’t aim to make this an academic experience.
“We’re inspired by the kitchens of French cuisine,” Alvarez says. “But it’s a balance. More than trying to explain techniques to our guests, it’s important to focus on colour, texture, ingredients and aroma - to make sure it’s a full sensory experience. It’s art.”
Cocktails starting at 15 euros ($27) Carrer de Muntaner, 108
Dr Stravinsky is a sepia-toned, Victorian-tinged haunt on a winding pedestrian street in El Born. The namesake composer refused to be confined by what was popular in his day, explains Cesar Montilla, the co-owner and general manager.
Experimentation was key, so Montilla adopted Stravinsky as an alter ego as he created the menu - a surrealist travelogue chronicling his own odyssey through Spain to learn various traditional culinary techniques.
In Albacete, he worked with a local producer to make a vinegar from rhubarb, sweet potato wine and pink pepper. As a straight ingredient, it brings a tart edge to a fizzy gin cocktail and gives dimension as a stand-in for lime juice in an Old Cuban (traditionally rum, lime, mint and sugar).
Pickled-carrot syrup gives zing to a Cognac old-fashioned. A strawberry shrub gives body to a date-infused rum cocktail. And when it’s used to make pickled grapes, the garnish takes the spotlight in a gin concoction.
But not to be missed are the drinks involving goat cheese that Montilla developed with cheesemakers in Andalusia. I was particularly enthralled with Crack the Beat, a hot-pink potion with a cheese-infused mix of tequila and mezcal, sherry, and a beet and berry cordial.
Cocktails starting at 13 euros ($23.36) Carrer Miralles, 5
Foco has white stone and brick walls, blonde-wood fixtures, and a stone bar-top, giving it the look of a Japanese home. The drinks similarly strike you as minimalist when they arrive. But that simplicity is a clever ruse.
Theo Quinn and Tom Godfrey, British expats who cut their teeth in some of England’s most celebrated bars, opened Foco in 2022. Shorthand for “foreign correspondents”, the name is a tribute to the international social clubs where journalists once gathered.
The pair’s modus operandi is to challenge everything you know about stalwart classic drinks and redefine each by its flexibility.
“If there’s a drink you think you don’t like, we’ll make it approachable for you,” Godfrey said.
He suggested the often candy-sweet Amaretto sour. Foco’s is a Scotch-forward blend that showcases Amaretto’s almond flavour, but without the liqueur itself. Godfrey explained how an apple-almond champagne and mulled cherry cordial give the drink its flavour and fizz. An Amaretto sour drinker can still abide, but this tall, malty, nutty, fruity formula is a fresh invention - one that knowingly winks at the original.
Cocktails starting at 12 euros ($21.50) 52 Carrer de l’Encarnacio
The chef chats to Herald Travel about unforgettable foodie experiences in Aotearoa.