It’s not often that a restaurant empire is built around a single dish or, in this case, a cocktail, but the same holds true for Javier de las Muelas. Entranced by the dry martini, he spent a couple of years in London gathering antique bottles of gin and vermouth, before journeying back to Barcelona and setting up the bar which would grow into the Dry Martini, the fulcrum around which his trans Atlantic bar empire was built.
Getting dirty
Darpan and I are two soccer dads looking for a quiet night out on town, and the name on top of everyone’s list in Barcelona is clearly Dry Martini. It’s an old-style bar, with banquette style seating and white-coated, bow-tied bar staff. The cocktail menu promises a wealth of creativity, but we decide to get the elephant in the room out of the way, and order a dry martini each. I go walk about for a bit, chat with the bartender who’s making my drink. This gives me a chance to see a digital counter at one end of the bar, which counts down, in real time, how many dry martini’s have been sold. At last count, a staggering figure of 1,071, 215, since 1978.
A Dry Martini is a simple drink, but easy to mess up. And potent, as evidenced from the quote, attributed to the American writer and wit, Dorothy Parker, “I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.” It does, however, require a precise amount of stirring, temperature (“cold to the point of brief anaesthesia”) and just dry enough (a reference to the style of Vermouth used).
“Drink it quickly, while it’s still laughing at you”, advised the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930, a piece of advice we followed to the T for our dry martinis, which hit every spot, as promised, and then some.
Tapas time
Day two sees me heading to a swinging bar and restaurant district in Barcelona called El Born. My first stop is Euskal Etxea, located at Placeta de Montcada, which serves up “pintxos” or tapas, Basque style. The modus operandi, however, remains the same as other tapas bars. Each pintxo is served up with a toothpick and you take what you like, keeping the used toothpicks on your plate, with your bill totted up at the end of the evening by counting the number of toothpicks. Euskal is one of the oldest pintxo bars in town and was standing room only, with taking a place at the bar made difficult by the crowded platters of pintxos.
I order a glass of cava, sparkling wine from Spain, grown primarily in the region of Catalonia, and spend a convivial half hour. Toothpicks counted and bill paid, I head towards the Passeig del Born, thronging with bars, and look for a likely one where I can try a nice glass of Vermouth, and I hit on No Se, an Italian cocktail Bar, where the bartender guides me to an interesting looking brand called Punt a Mes.
Vermouth is wine that has been aromatised and fortified. It’s a key ingredient of many classic cocktails including the martini, the Negroni and the Manhattan, but can also be drunk solo, and that’s how I had my slug of Punt a Mes — a large shot on ice, with an orange peel dunked in. Just the right amount of bittersweet, with the bitter as I later discover, coming from the addition of quinine, an ingredient which was also to form the basis of my next drink.
G&T
When in Barcelona, one of the drinks you must have is a glass of gin and tonic served up in a massive balloon-shaped glass, chock full of ice. The bartender recommends that I try G’Vine, a brand from France, distilled from grapes and infused with vine flowers. No Se is a lively little bar, with a few tables and a bunch of bar stools, one of which I’ve been fortunate enough to get a hold of. Sated with the tapas I had early in the evening and with a mix of cava, vermouth and now G&T sloshing around my innards, I know it is time to beat a retreat, and I head out through the thronging crowds.
Burgers, baguette and bars
In 2015, on a visit to the Bar Convent Berlin, I had the good fortune to meet Pol Mas, a visiting bartender from Barcelona who was now bar-in-charge at La Bombilla, a lovely little neighbourhood bar situated in Sant Antoni, an area of Barcelona, which is about to get a whole lot busier with the impending restoration of the nearby Sant Antoni market. The design provides enough opportunity for guests to circulate and fraternise, especially via the long tables at the back of the bar. Pol is Catalan and proud. He recommends I try a cocktail called the Nostra Superbia (Our Pride), made with Gin Mare, a superb Catalan gin. Gin Mare’s key botanicals (flavouring agents) are rosemary, thyme, basil and the locally-grown Arbequina olives, and Pol’s cocktail takes us on a tour of the same using similar ingredients to complement the botanicals in the gin. As Pol is mixing the drinks, Benoit, the bar owner, nips out to buy a couple of burgers for their dinner.
Nostra Superbia is tall and refreshing, which does a lot to leaven the trauma my son’s football team has been having in the tournament they’ve come for. In the time I take to down it, Benoit returns with the burgers, and Pol now wants me to experience Benoit’s side of the bar, which relates to wine and cheese. The cheese platter comprises gourmet cheeses from hand picked vendors, and Benoit lets them gradually come to room temperature. He then adroitly saws off some chunks of baguette, plates the cheese, and pours me a lovely glass of Yotuel Roble 2014, a red wine from the Ribera del Duero. I urge the duo to join and they each pour themselves a glass. The cheese and wine are both delicious and I need little urging to reach a third glass. Pol and Benoit meanwhile have now pulled out their burgers and are chomping away, wine glasses by their side.
A bar’s objective, I feel, should be to put the guest at ease, and in the course of that evening, Pol and Benoit did not deviate from that objective in the least, whether for me or the few guests at La Bombilla, whose name literally translates to “The Lightbulb”, as they’d like it to be a place “where good ideas happen”.
The writer is the co-founder and CEO of Tulleeho, a drinks training and consulting firm and founder-CEO of Bar X, a bar products retail venture. Follow him at @tulleeho
