Sips

Eixample's Cocktail Counterpoint

The Eixample grid is one of the most legible pieces of urban planning in Europe: Ildefons Cerdà's 19th-century octagonal blocks, wide pavements, and chamfered corners impose a certain rational calm on Barcelona's middle districts. C/ de Muntaner cuts through that grid on a slight diagonal, a street lined with design studios, neighbourhood restaurants, and the kind of quiet professional energy that sits far from the tourist-saturated Gothic Quarter. It is not the obvious address for a bar that has, in the space of four years, reached the summit of the global cocktail rankings. That distance from the expected — from the old-port theatrics, from the El Born cocktail cluster — is part of what defines Sips's position in the city. The bar did not arrive on the coattails of an established scene; it built its own gravity in a neighbourhood that had no particular cocktail identity to trade on.

Barcelona's bar culture has historically split between the old-school vermut tradition (the late-morning glass at a marble counter, olives on the side) and a more recent wave of technically ambitious cocktail rooms concentrated in the Born and Raval districts. Bars like Boadas, operating since 1933, represent one pole of that spectrum: the Barcelona classic, a reference point for the city's relationship with the daiquiri and the dry martini. Dry Martini occupies a comparable position, trading on decades of institutional authority. Dr. Stravinsky and Foco represent the newer experimental cohort. Sips sits in a different register from all of them: it entered the World's 50 Best Bars list at #37 in its first year of eligibility (2021), then climbed to #1 by 2023, a trajectory with no close parallel in recent bar history.

The Format: Two Programs Under One Roof

The bar's spatial logic makes a deliberate argument. Where most high-end cocktail rooms lean into intimacy , low ceilings, dim booths, the language of the speakeasy , Sips's island design pushes against that convention. The bar structure itself becomes a centrepiece, a piece of furniture as much as a service point, visible and approachable from multiple angles. The room does not hide what it does; it displays it. Drinks are constructed in view, and the presentation is part of the proposition: the Nixtamil, one of the bar's most-discussed compositions, involves licking a red fruit reduction from a small mirror before moving to the primary drink, a combination of bourbon, corn, and miso distillate. The Tommy's Margarita riff adds strawberry and yellow aji. These are not drinks that arrive and disappear; they are paced, sequenced experiences that use the physical act of drinking as part of the design.

Inside the main bar operation sits Esencia, a bar within a bar that opened as the team's next formal development. Esencia seats 14 and operates as a tasting menu format, presenting a curated sequence of drinks that push further into experimental territory than the main floor program. The 14-seat constraint is a meaningful signal: at that capacity, every service is effectively a private event, and the pacing, sequencing, and narrative arc of the menu can be controlled with a precision that an open bar environment cannot sustain. For context, this format puts Esencia in a small peer group internationally alongside programs like Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu, where the tasting-menu model has become a way of pushing cocktail service toward the vocabulary and structure of fine dining.

The Credentials Behind the Program

The broader shift in the global bar industry over the past fifteen years has been a move from personality-led rooms toward program-led rooms: the question is no longer primarily who is behind the bar, but what the bar's intellectual framework produces. Sips represents that shift in its clearest form. Simone Caporale built a track record at Artesian in London, where the bar reached the #1 position on the World's 50 Best Bars list five times during his tenure. Marc Álvarez spent more than a decade working with the Adrià brothers, whose El Bulli framework defined what experimental gastronomy could look like when technique was placed at the service of concept rather than tradition. Those two lineages , international bar competition and avant-garde culinary research , produced a working method at Sips that treats the cocktail as a format capable of the same precision and conceptual depth as a tasting menu dish.

The awards trajectory confirms the peer set the bar operates in. The 2023 #1 ranking on the World's 50 Best Bars was followed by a #3 position in 2024, and the bar placed #10 in the Top 500 Bars ranking in 2025. That sustained presence across multiple years and multiple ranking bodies is a stronger signal than a single peak: bars that spike and fall typically reflect a novelty cycle; bars that maintain top-10 positions across four consecutive years are doing something structurally durable. Spain's broader cocktail scene has grown in international standing over this period, with programs in Madrid (see Angelita) and regional cities including Moonlight Experimental Bar in Zaragoza reaching the same rankings, but Sips remains the highest-placed Spanish entry in that cohort.

Getting There and Planning Your Visit

C/ de Muntaner, 108 sits in the Eixample Left (Esquerra de l'Eixample), roughly equidistant from the Urgell and Rocafort metro stations on Line 1. The neighbourhood is residential enough that the bar does not benefit from passing trade in the way a Passeig de Gràcia address might; it draws a deliberate clientele rather than a casual one. Google reviewers rate the bar 4.0 across 1,441 responses, a figure that reflects the gap between expectations calibrated by the global rankings and the lived experience of what is, ultimately, a single-room bar operating at scale. The bar opened in 2021, which means it has been building its reservation and operations infrastructure in parallel with its rankings ascent.

Booking for Esencia, at 14 seats, requires advance planning of the kind associated with tasting-menu restaurants rather than bars. The main floor operates with more flexibility, but demand relative to capacity means that drop-in visits during peak hours carry real uncertainty. The practical approach for anyone visiting Barcelona specifically to experience Sips is to treat it with the same advance planning you would apply to a Michelin-starred tasting menu: decide on the format (main bar or Esencia), book accordingly, and build the rest of the evening around it rather than treating it as a stop on a longer circuit.

For a broader picture of what Barcelona's bar scene offers across formats and price points, the EP Club Barcelona bars guide maps the full range. For the city's dining and hotel context, the Barcelona restaurants guide, Barcelona hotels guide, Barcelona wineries guide, and Barcelona experiences guide cover the adjacent planning decisions.