Chefs and dedicated diners throughout Barcelona are thrilled to proclaim, “Bar 68 is reborn!” For more than 10 years, this well-known and well-worn dive bar has served locals and travelers alike. Under new ownership, the old favorite has been refreshed with new staff, an appealing new menu and some of the best cocktails in the city.
The bar sits on Carrer de Sant Pau, one of Barcelona’s most colorful streets, which diverges off the tourist-trod Las Ramblas and brings pedestrians into El Raval, a part of the city with its own lively, pulsing character. Getting to Bar 68 is a journey in and of itself. Lined with countless used mobile phone shops, sweltering kebab restaurants, hole-in-the-wall hairdressers, classic lunch counters and the hip Filmoteca cinematography archive of Barcelona, the raucous street eventually skirts the bottom of the ample Rambla del Raval, passing the Iglesia de Sant Pau del Camp, the oldest chapel in Barcelona, before eventually spitting you out by the base of the post-industrial Avinguda del Paral·lel. El Raval is the most ethnically diverse section of the Ciutat Vella (Old City) of Barcelona, and the menu at the retooled Bar 68 captures deliciously the barri’s centuries-old history as a magnet for working-class and immigrant communities.
One can sense instantly, without even tasting the food, Bar 68’s unique character. From the giant, bizarre, one-of-a-kind photo triptych by Turner Prize-winning photographer Douglas Gordon hanging in the dining room to the vintage, tiled bar and glowing popcorn machine, the restaurant is marked by little touches of each stakeholder’s past, spiced with a bracing dose of the originality required for a new establishment to stand out from the crowd.
After seven years of cooking experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, followed by a year in Japan and six and a half years in Barcelona (two spent at Albert Adrià’s famed 41 Degrees), Bar 68’s head chef, Kaya Jacobs, is casting his wide net of experience over the vibrant energy of the neighborhood. He and his equally diverse team have crafted a menu that melds Latino, Asian, Mediterranean Spanish and Italian flavors, the latter influence surely coming from the restaurant’s owners, Max and Stefano Colombo. Since 2007, these Venetian twins have been steadily making their mark as a formidable duo in Barcelona, starting with the conceptualizing of their flagship restaurant Xemei (“Twins” in the Venetian dialect) at the top of Barcelona’s Poble Sec neighborhood.
“The original idea for Bar 68,” says Jacobs, “was to build everything around the cocktails. We started with small bites of food to go with the drinks, but quickly evolved into having much more substantial food offerings.”
Jacobs’s love for the food trends of San Francisco (especially modern Asian cuisine) is right at home in the neighborhood that was known for decades as the Barrio Chino (Chinatown) of Barcelona. However, this is not to say that Bar 68 is simply another establishment jumping on the “fusion” bandwagon. More telling is its reputation as a place where “industry people” go to eat. No one appreciates a jolt to his or her taste buds and a well-made cocktail served with style, after many hours of hard work, like a chef or bartender. Nothing beats bringing a stress-filled evening shift to a tipsy close over delicious spicy, salty, crunchy and tender treats while talking shop with people who know what it’s like in the trenches of a professional kitchen, bar or dining room at dinner service.
To start, the cocktails at Bar 68 are superb, blending house-made ingredients in singular, creative combinations. The list of standard and offbeat offerings is constantly evolving as Miguel and his bar staff experiment with new infusions, syrups, recipes and techniques. Our personal favorite is a simple classic, the “Moscow Mule,” but Bar 68’s spin beats all other versions we’ve sipped due to Miguel’s spicy, house-made ginger beer. Served in the traditional copper mug, winter or summer this cocktail is an instantly refreshing crowd pleaser. At the far end of the eccentricity spectrum is the “Maryland Sour,” hop-infused vodka with elderflower liqueur, ginger sugar, grapefruit and “hemp” smoke, served in a wooden matryoshka, or Russian nesting doll.
The menu at Bar 68 features small (one- or two-bite) tapas, as well as some larger plates, all for between €3.50 and €14 each. You could spend anywhere from €15 to €70 on your meal, but the average tab is around €30 for a nice cocktail and a few plates. Jacobs’s eclectic offerings include crispy Indian samosas of hake, potato and harissa curry with mango-tamarind chutney; braised pork belly yakitori with Chinese five-spice and scallions; beef tongue tacos with Italian salsa verde and radish; smoked deviled eggs dyed with beet juice and spiked with sriracha; grilled octopus with black garlic, sesame and house-made kimchi; and whole steamed dorado (gilt-head bream), de-boned and served in a broth of coconut milk.
Bar 68 also offers a €68 tasting menu that includes both regularly offered and newly conjured dishes, plus an included drink pairing (champagne, cocktails or mezcal with a mandarin-lemon verbena water chaser).
For classic tapas, Bar 68 probably won’t suit, but if you’re game for a restaurant that nicely sums up the energy and evolutionary style of Barcelona’s next-generation food culture, we suggest you put yourself in the experienced hands of the Bar 68 crew and join the experiment.
Published on January 15, 2015
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