Alkimia is on the first floor of a brewery, and there is a bell. You press it from the landing of the Fàbrica Moritz, the old Moritz beer works on Ronda Sant Antoni, and someone comes. Michelin’s own entry calls the location “somewhat surprising,” which is the guide being polite about the fact that nothing at street level tells you a one-star restaurant is upstairs. Jordi Vilà and Sònia Profitós opened Alkimia in 2002 in the Eixample and ran it there for fourteen years. They moved it here in 2016, into what had been the Moritz family’s own apartment.

Behind the bell there are two restaurants, and this is the thing to get right before you book. One is Alkostat, the bistro. The other is Alkimia proper, the dining room with the star. They share an address, a floor and a kitchen, and they are not the same evening. I ate in the dining room.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. I watched a couple arrive just behind me, give the name at the top of the stairs, and be walked to the other room, perfectly happy as far as I could tell, but not eating the menu they had read about. Whatever brought you up the stairs, name it when you write.

The room, and what it used to be

You can still read the apartment in it. High ceilings, tall windows onto the ronda, the proportions of a family that could afford the good floor of their own factory. Principal, in the Barcelona way of numbering, is the grand one just above the street. The tables are round and dressed in heavy white cloth. The cutlery is horn-handled. There is a blue brushstroke glazed onto the rim of several of the plates, the same mark on the fish course and on the squid, so it reads as the house pattern rather than decoration for one dish.

The lighting is low and, at the far end, faintly blue. There is a lit panel somewhere behind the last table that turns up in the corner of photographs. It is the only thing in the room that feels like 2016 rather than 1902.

One menu, six movements

The dining room runs a single tasting menu, La Taula de Cuina Catalana, the Catalan cuisine table, and the kitchen sets it out in six sections rather than as a numbered run of courses. There is an à la carte list, La Carta de Jordi Vilà, and a shorter midday menu, La Taula del Migdia. Ordering the tasting menu is the point of coming, and it is the version the room is built around.

The food is Catalan and it is mostly from the sea. Vilà has a reputation among cooks as a chef’s chef. He does not do television and he does not do the circuit, and what that means in practice is a menu with very little decoration on it. Things are cooked hard, seasoned assertively, and sent out.

It opens light and salty. Ribbons of potato fried until they buckle, thyme, enough paprika to leave dust on the plate. You eat them with your hands. It is the least serious thing served all night and it sets the level for everything after: this is a kitchen that is not going to be precious with you.

The rice, which is the reason to come

Vilà’s rice is the dish people travel for. The house signature is the arròs de colom, rice with squab and truffle; what arrived on my menu was the sea version, and I would not trade it. Rice cooked loose and wet rather than dry, the grains still holding, a slick of dark shellfish stock around the edge of the plate, and a piece of red mullet laid over the top with the skin left crisp and the stripe still showing. Beside it, a lace of something fried into a crisp golden net: brittle, faintly sweet, there to be broken into the rice.

I have eaten a lot of rice in this city and most of it is drier than this, cooked down until the grains separate and the pan leaves a crust. Vilà goes the other way. The rice arrives still moving on the plate, and by the time you have worked from the edge to the middle it has tightened into something else entirely. The same dish twice, in one sitting. This is the course that explains the star. It is not clever, and it is not trying to be. It is a rice dish cooked by someone who has cooked several thousand of them, and the seasoning is a full step louder than a cautious kitchen would dare.

You are given a printed menu on the table and it stays there through the meal. It is a small thing and I liked it. You can look down and see where you are, rather than reconstructing the evening afterwards from memory.

The fish course

Mullet a second time, deliberately: crisp skin, an egg yolk broken into a green oil sharp with herbs, an artichoke heart, a scatter of something crushed and savoury. The yolk and the oil make a sauce on the plate as you eat, which is the whole idea, and the artichoke is there to stop it becoming rich.

They poured a red against it. I would not have chosen red with mullet and I was wrong; it is a light one, cold enough to be surprising, and it holds up against the herb oil in a way a white would have surrendered to.

The seasoning here is a full step louder than a cautious kitchen would dare. That is the argument for the place.

Dessert, and the neon

Dessert arrives in a cut-crystal glass that looks inherited, filled with a sharp orange fruit mousse and capped with a crisp. Alongside, on a folded paper napkin, a rectangular tile of dark red fruit set firm enough to pick up. The napkin is not an affectation; the tile is sticky and you need it.

The chocolate-and-olive-oil dessert the restaurant is known for did not appear on my menu. If you want it, ask when you book rather than on the night.

The counter-argument

Two things, and neither is the food.

The first is the room. It is handsome and it is quiet and it is also, on a full night, quite hard to hear across. The ceilings that make it beautiful send everything upward, and by the middle of the meal I was leaning in. If you are coming to talk, take a table away from the centre.

The second is the bell. Not the bell itself, which is charming, but what it stands for. Nothing about arriving here is smooth in the way a hotel dining room is smooth. You find the factory, you find the stairs, you press the bell, you wait. On a wet night with a booking you are late for, it is a lot of friction for a restaurant at this level, and it is worth building ten minutes in for it.

What is not a fair complaint: the star. Alkimia has held one for a very long time, and the restaurant says twenty consecutive years. There is a school of thought that it should have a second by now. Having eaten it, I think one is right, and I do not mean that as a criticism. This is a restaurant that decided what it was and stopped negotiating.

Know before you go

Book direct. The dining room and Alkostat take separate reservations and it is entirely possible to end up in the wrong one, so say Alkimia, and say the tasting menu, when you write.

It is upstairs in the Fàbrica Moritz on Ronda Sant Antoni 41, the principal floor. Ring the bell. There is a private room at the front, Aldavant, if you are a group.

Lunch is a different, shorter menu. If you only have one meal in Barcelona, make it dinner in the dining room.

See the full set: Alkimia, Barcelona — in frames.

A kitchen that decided what it was and stopped negotiating. Order the rice.

There is a restaurant underneath this one. Bresca has been on 14th Street since 2017 and is the reason most people know Ryan Ratino’s name; Jônt opened above it in 2020 and is the reason the guide gave him two stars. You go through the same door and up. Sixteen seats, one counter, and a kitchen that is not behind anything.

That last part is the whole design. The counter is the pass. What is being plated in front of you is what you are about to eat, and the people plating it are close enough that you can hear the tweezers touch the rim.

Sixteen seats, and no back of house

The room is smaller than the reputation suggests and much brighter than most tasting counters. White stone, pale wood, a rank of copper and steel on open shelves behind the line. There is no music you would notice. The only decoration is a single orchid and, on the pass, a Michelin figurine that somebody has clearly decided to leave exactly where it is.

Because the kitchen faces you, the service and the cooking are the same people. The cook who seared something forty seconds ago walks it two metres and puts it down in front of you, and says what it is in about eight words. It makes for a quieter, less theatrical evening than a room with a dedicated front of house, and I preferred it.

Jônt is a Relais & Châteaux house, which on a sixteen-seat counter above a bistro reads as slightly incongruous until you have sat through the service. The association is usually shorthand for a certain kind of country hotel; here it is doing something more specific, which is vouching for consistency in a room where consistency is the entire technical challenge.

One more thing about the counter, which took me most of the evening to work out. There is no service station in the room. No sideboard of cutlery, no tray of spare glasses, nothing tucked behind a screen, because there is no screen. Everything that arrives at your place has come from the line, carried by the person who made it, and everything that leaves goes back the same way. It is a small structural decision and it changes the texture of the whole meal: there is no moment where a member of staff you have not seen before appears at your shoulder.

The consequence is that you end up in conversation with the kitchen whether you intended to or not. Not performatively; nobody is working the room. But if you ask what something is, the answer comes from the person who cooked it, and it is usually a sentence longer than you expected.

Fifteen courses, and where the produce comes from

The menu runs to fifteen courses and the sourcing is the point of it: Michelin’s own entry describes seafood and meat from Japan as the core of the kitchen, and that is what you taste. Hokkaido uni. Bluefin. Wagyu, in a tart small enough to eat in one. Rice from Koshiibuki, which is a variety rather than a place, worked with crab and mushroom and shaved black truffle.

It would be easy for that list to become the argument, and for a couple of courses in the middle it very nearly does. What stops it is the sauce work. Ratino’s kitchen makes proper reduced sauces, glossy and quite dark and unmistakably French in method, and puts them under Japanese produce. That combination is the restaurant.

The plating is the same every time and it is done in front of you, which is a risk most kitchens would not take. Fifteen courses is a lot of chances to be caught being sloppy, and over an evening I did not see a plate wiped twice or a garnish put on crooked.

The seasoning is confident without being loud. Nothing arrived that needed salt, and only one thing, a sauce late in the savoury run, was rich enough that I was glad the portion was the size it was.

A French kitchen’s sauces under Japanese produce, cooked two metres from your hands. That combination is what the kitchen is for.

The order of the meal is worth describing because it is not the order most tasting menus use. It opens cold and small: things you eat in one, in sequence, quite quickly. Then it slows sharply through the middle where the sauces arrive, then speeds up again for dessert. The effect is that the heaviest eating happens when you are most awake for it, around the second third, rather than being back-loaded the way a classical menu would.

Two courses in the middle run are doing the real work. One is a rice dish, warm and quite loose, built to carry whatever is shaved over it. The other is a piece of protein with a reduction that has clearly been going since the morning. Everything on either side of those two is lighter than you expect, and I think deliberately. They are the two you are meant to remember.

The reservation, which is the hard part

Getting in is properly difficult and it is worth understanding why before you start refreshing anything. Sixteen seats and one sitting means the entire capacity of a night is smaller than a single large table at a conventional restaurant. There is no walk-in, no bar, and no second service to fall back on.

The practical advice: book the moment the window opens, take any seat you are offered rather than holding out for a date, and go alone or as a two if you can. A four is materially harder at a sixteen-seat counter than the arithmetic suggests, because it is a quarter of the room.

This is also not Ratino’s only room, and has not been for some time. The group behind it runs Bresca downstairs and has opened elsewhere in the city since. That matters less than it might: on the night I was there he was on the line, and the cooking did not read like a kitchen being run remotely.

The counter-argument

Two things, and the first is structural.

You cannot opt out of the pace. Everyone starts together and moves together, which is what makes the room work, but it means the evening runs at the kitchen’s speed rather than yours. Fifteen courses arrive when they are ready. If you are the kind of diner who likes a long gap in the middle of a meal to sit and talk, this is not the room for it, and there is no polite way to slow it down without holding up fifteen other people.

And it is bright. Not harsh, but lit like a working kitchen rather than a dining room, because it is one. That is honest and it suits the food, and it also means a table of four having a big night out will feel more exposed here than they would downstairs. Some people want the dim room. This is not the dim room.

What is not a fair complaint: the produce. There is a line of thinking that a kitchen flying seafood from Japan is buying its stars rather than cooking them. Sitting two metres from the sauce work, that argument does not survive the evening.

Know before you go

Book direct through the restaurant. Jônt and Bresca take separate reservations and it is the same front door, so be specific about which you want.

Tell them about allergies when you book, not on the night. Fifteen courses at a sixteen-seat counter leaves the kitchen very little room to improvise.

Mention an occasion if you have one. The end of the meal is where they put it.

And sit down when you are told to. Everyone starts together, and arriving late at a counter this size is conspicuous in a way it would not be anywhere else.

See the full set: Jônt, Washington DC — in frames.

Sixteen seats, fifteen courses, and a French sauce kitchen hiding behind Japanese produce. Book the counter and take whatever date they give you.