THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Putting Cutting-Edge Design on the Table

In Barcelona, Michelin-Starred Chefs Are Teaming Up With Designers to Create Innovative

By J.S. MARCUS

Barcelona is feasting once again on the Avinguda del Paral•lel, the broad 19th-century boulevard south of Barcelona's historic center. Once the city's thriving theater district, the avenue and surrounding streets grew derelict in the last few decades of the 20th century, missing out on Barcelona's spectacular resurgence. Now, symbolized by the 2010 reopening of El Molino, a cabaret-style theater, the area has become a hot spot—and ground zero for the city's latest culinary trend.

Sergi Vicente Puig

Seating at the 41° Experience, Ferran and Albert Adrià's new restaurant

Near the top of any serious foodie's go-to list, Barcelona is starting to offer diners more than just great food, as chefs are teaming with up designers to create cutting-edge restaurant spaces.

Ferran Adrià may have closed down El Bulli, his gastronomic legend a few hours' drive up the coast from Barcelona, but you can find the same approach to cooking in a whole new setting on El Paral•lel, as Barcelona residents call the theater-lined boulevard. Last year, Mr. Adrià and his brother Albert, a trained pastry chef who also worked at El Bulli, launched Tickets, a tapas bar with a kitsch-filled, rollicking design; and this spring, they relaunched the neighboring cocktail bar, now called 41° Experience, as a select fine-dining restaurant, offering 41 courses to some 15 diners, in a room dominated by a multimedia installation from Spanish artist Javier Milara.

Francesc Guillamet

Dos Palillos, a Catalan-Japanese restaurant

Meanwhile, a short walk up the boulevard, El Equipo Creativo, the boutique Barcelona firm behind the designs of Tickets and 41°, is completing work on Ikibana, a Japanese-Brazilian fusion restaurant scheduled for a late June opening.

Tickets, featuring several in-your-face open kitchens and spotlight affects, makes diners feel like extras in some staged spectacle; Ikibana tries to create a feeling of "walking onto an island," says El Equipo Creativo's German-born principal, architect Oliver Franz Schmidt. Using woven wooden sheets to create a forest-like atmosphere, the restaurant employs natural colors, like sand and shades of green.

Many of the city's leading chefs are starting to place design alongside food as an essential ingredient in a successful restaurant. Alkimia, a Michelin-starred restaurant led by Jordi Vilà, is getting ready to move from its current plush location, near the Sagrada Familia church, to Ronda de Sant Pau, just off El Paral•lel.

The site is home to the restored Moritz Brewery, an ambitious food-and-design complex created for the Barcelona beer label by Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Jean Nouvel. The microbrewery and ground-floor bar, featuring a midprice menu overseen by Mr. Vilà, opened in December 2011. The complex is also set to include a wine bar and a basement brasserie. The crowning touch will come when Alkimia opens its new space in the first-floor apartment that once served as home to the brewery's founders, an Alsatian family who moved to Spain the mid-19th century.

Mr. Nouvel "is a key piece in the project," says Mr. Vilà, who says his plan for the new, more domestic Alkimia is to "give the impression of somebody coming over for dinner."

Pierre Clémençon

The Moritz Brewery

The project has already launched its own iconic design—a sleek, armless dining chair, "La chaise Moritz," created by Mr. Nouvel and his studio, and used throughout the bar area.

"The standard of food in town is already very high," says Dani Isern, a Barcelona architect, "so the competition is very high. If you want that extra plus, you go straight to design."

Mr. Isern and his firm, Alonso Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados, worked on a new project together with Xavier Franco, another local celebrity chef. Last year, Mr. Franco relocated his Michelin-star restaurant Saüc to an upper floor in the new luxury hotel, the Ohla, near the Art Nouveau landmark concert hall, the Palau de la Música Catalana. The team also launched a high-end tapas bar on the ground floor. Both spaces feature an innovative design, using woven stainless-steel mesh.

Lighting is key in the tapas bar, says Mr. Isern. The high-windowed room is remarkable for its large mesh-covered medallions, which appear golden, thanks to direct gold-colored light.

Lighting is also decisive in another new Michelin-star restaurant interior in the Eixample district, where Catalan-Canadian chef Jordi Artal relaunched Cinq Sentis, his 8-year-old restaurant, last fall. He and his design team substituted round tables for square ones; exchanged red for black, white and copper; and created a much more intimate feel, thanks to lights that help to isolate the tables from each other.

The new décor—which includes an old grapevine presented as a minimalist sculpture, and select use of copper-plated chains—was something of a concession to Spain's real-estate crash. Ideally, says Mr. Artal, the restaurant would have moved to a new space, but now isn't the time to buy; the new €40,000 interior was a solution. He is still considering a move, he says, but "we will take this style with us."

A pioneer in the new trend is the Catalan-Japanese restaurant, Dos Palillos, which opened in 2008 next to the city's designer Casa Camper hotel in the Raval district. With a design by Fernando Amat, owner of the city's famed home-furnishing store Vinçon, Dos Palillos is the handiwork of chef Albert Raurich, a protégé of Mr. Adrià. The restaurant, serving Japanese food using Catalan ingredients, is divided in two: a red-hued Japanese space with a wide open kitchen; and a more brightly lit bar, with dramatically high bar stools.

A restaurant's design, like its menu, is often a work in progress. Dos Palillos's stools, created especially for the space, are gorgeous, high-concept pieces, meant to suggest standing up as much as sitting down. They are lovely to look at, but using them can be a challenge.

"The customers complained," says Mr. Raurich, "so we finally gave in and made some lower, more comfortable stools.

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL