«In these past six years the style at Tickets has changed greatly. Initially, we wanted it to be a bar, but over time it became much more than a restaurant: it now expresses a concept of its own. I don’t know what limits it can have because my team improves everyday».

Albert Adrià, coordinador gastronomico of one of the most intelligent and successful places in the world is happy. It’s a round-the-corner place, informal and noisy, serving fine dining. A vortex of 1000 tapas per night, prepared by 55 professionals who squeeze in between kitchen, counters and tables, remotely controlled in a way that didn’t even Guardiola’s Barça wasn’t capable of.

Some one hundred guests, sitting on iron benches, benefit from this. They’re dubious whether to pay attention to the magnificent nibbles appearing under their nose, to the circus islands directed by sommeliers dressed like lion tamers or to the ice cream trolleys puffing roving liquid nitrogen.

Albert Adrià, 48, gastronomic coordinator at Tickets and 5 more restaurants in Barcelona (photo @ticketsbar instagram)

People should go to the restaurant to have good (great) food but also to enjoy a memorable show. The Adrià brothers have always been convinced of this: «Decontextualisation, irony, spectacle, performance are completely legitimate» is what they wrote some time ago at number 21 in the Bulli manifesto. This is why, when the Cala Montjoi era ended in 2011, Albert and Ferran never gave up to the post-crisis funereal atmosphere that suddenly erased the smiles of chefs and restaurateurs, forced by the balance sheet to silence the euphoria of technique and focus on ingredients.

In March 2011, Living la vida tapa, Tickets’s refrain (one Michelin star a short while later), started to shake el Barri around Avenida del Parallel with liveliness, a love for micro-cuisine with new scores that two years later paved the way for the nikkei cuisine of Pakta (another star), the perfect new take on Catalan case da comida offered by Bodega 1900. And in 2014 arrived taqueria Niño Viejo and the signature cuisine of Hoja Santa (third star), for Grant Achatz «the two best Mexican restaurants outside Mexico». A picture completed by Enigma, the most ambitious establishment, opened last February, a meal in three acts that is still looking for a fully developed plot.

«Six restaurants [plus Heart in Ibiza], 200 employees and we’re not losing money»: Albert Adrià sums up the numbers of the business opened with Ferran and the Iglesias brothers, called elBarri. With flagship Tickets setting the example, and putting into practice even the second part of the famous number 21: «Irony and performance indeed, as long as they’re not banal and follow or are connected to a gastronomic thought».

In the 27 tapas journey from two weeks ago [every detail in the photo gallery above], we found formidable noble products (caviar, foie gras, lobster, wagyu beef) and poor products (chicken skin, sea cucumber); Bullinian  icons (spherified olives and the airbaguette of Iberian jamon, already in the menu at Bulli) and new discoveries (everything else); global techniques (panko, dashi, “sushi”) and local explorations (manchego cheese, regaña). Everything adds up and defines a round-the-corner bar that makes its guests have a damn good time.