Get Your Tickets to El Celler de Can Roca! Two Catalan Restaurants Named to Top-50 in World

It’s been a good year for Catalán Cuisine.

El Celler de Can Roca, a home-grown Catalán restaurant located about 100 km north of Barcelona in Girona,  was named the world’s best restaurant by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, a culinary committee who makes a yearly list of the world’s 100 best restaurants.

 

El Celler de Can Roca, Best Restaurant in the World, Barcelona Blog
Barcelona’s Tickets Bar placed 42nd on the list, making it the highest — and only — rated Barcelona restaurant in the top 100. Madrid’s DiverXO, the only three-star Michelin restaurant south of Basque Country, placed 59th on the list.

Congrats to El Celler de Can Roca, named the best restaurant in the world!! @CanRocaCeller

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In all, Spain had seven restaurants place in the top 50 and nine restaurants place in the top 100.

S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna sponsor the awards. They gave each restaurant a nice write-up, explaining what makes the eatery worthy of a spot on the list.

El Celler de Can Roca (Girona, Catalonia, Spain)

This is what the committee had to say about El Celler de Can Roca, a restaurant run by the three Roca brothers:

The collective genius of the Roca brothers is well documented. The holy trinity of head chef Joan’s thoughtful but original cooking, pastry chef Jordi’s imagination-defying desserts and sommelier Josep’s beautifully considered wine pairings already adds up to significantly more than the sum of its parts, before you add in a vibrant family dynamic and a deep sense of hospitality.

Tickets Bar (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)

The committee was equally praiseworthy of Tickets, who finished higher than Madrid’s DiverXO even though the Barcelona hot-spot received a single 2015 Michelin star compared to the trifecta its Madrid rival won:

Tickets may have been open a few years now, but it still feels like the future of top-end gastronomic dining. A sense of fun pervades every facet of this cinema-themed operation, from the door staff’s eccentric uniforms to the ice-cream cart’s bell that signals the end of the savoury phase of the meal. The chefs behind this Barcelona-based big leaguer are Albert Adrià, who also picks up The World’s Best Pastry Chef award this year, and his talented cohort Fran Agudo.

Albert Adriá, Tickets (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)

Along with the list of the world’s best restaurants, The Top 50 also gives awards to chefs. This year, Tickets’ Albert Adriá won the title of World’s Best Pastry Chef.  Here’s what the selection committee had to say about the brother of legendary chef Ferran Adriá:

After a meal at Tickets, guests are ushered into a room that’s redolent of an acid trip in a sweet shop. Giant ceramic berries hang from the ceiling, Willy Wonka clips from Charlie & The Chocolate Factory loop on wall-mounted TV screens and a subtle aroma of fruit permeates the air.

Within the open kitchen, serious-looking chefs make playful desserts. ‘Pancakes’ look like the real deal but are actually constructed from an impossibly thin layer of caramelised sugar and filled with a cloud-like rum cream; a delicate liquid of lychee and rose water is encased in an equally fragile sphere and presented in the middle of a rose.

The tweezer-wielding chef responsible for this jaw-dropping technical wizardry is Albert Adrià. While his brother Ferran is considerably more famous, insiders know that the younger sibling was also instrumental in the world-renowned success of El Bulli.

 

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