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Adrià trades El Bulli pomp for tapas panto
Adrià trades El Bulli pomp for tapas panto
SIDESHOW Just as Ferran Adrià seems about to evolve post-molecular cuisine to a game-altering level with the closure of El Bulli restaurant this summer, our culinary Cervantes conjures a stunt of the opposite kind: Tickets, a prosaically named return to tapas in central Barcelona, with his brother Albert, and 41° cocktail bar where Adrià’s signature El Bulli snacks can be had. It’s like a designer diffusion line, for those who never got to - or couldn’t afford - the real El Bulli. Ferran doesn’t cook at Tickets but helps with the organisation and project development when he’s not on Bulli duty. More Rabelaisian than refined, Tickets brings El Bulli’s performance art down to street level panto - the exterior resembles a theatrical booking agent-cum-post-war Odeon cinema, and the interior the trappings of a temporary kiosk where even the doorman dresses like a circus ringmaster. Not cheap, but cheerful, and hardly simple, it’s quixotic tapanza. Booking for now - three months in advance - is by way of a button at Tickets’ website, and not by e-mail or telephone. Roll up! (ticketsbar.es)
Photography by Sergi Vicente Puig