Tiberi Bar
By Michael Mueller
After years of pop-ups and suppers, the Tiberi Club collective finally has a room of its own on Vila i Vilà, and it was worth the wait. H3O Architects built the space around a bottle-green marble bar under low light, around 80 square meters in all – small enough that you’ll likely end the night talking to whoever landed on the next stool.
The wine list is natural and mostly close to home: small growers from the Penedès and around Tarragona, with detours into southern France. It’s an easy list to navigate whether you arrive with opinions about skin contact or just want to point at something good, and classic cocktails cover anyone who’d rather skip the grapes altogether.
From the kitchen come Mediterranean plates built for sharing, with vegetables doing much of the heavy lifting: pumpkin with labneh and pumpkin seeds, grilled polenta with fresh sage, house-made ice cream to finish. The calling card is the gilda – the classic skewer of olive, guindilla and anchovy, here with a cube of cheese and a radish added. It’s the kind of liberty that raises eyebrows in San Sebastián and empties plates in Poble-sec.
The bar shares its building with a cinema and a nightclub – Casa Montjuïc is next door and Laut beyond it – so dinner before a film or a plate after a set needs no cab. Few blocks in the city offer that.