Marc Álvarez possesses the best bar in the world. At the World’s 50 Best Bars ceremony in Singapore last month Barcelona’s Sips, which he co-owns with Simone Caporale, took the number one spot, immortalising the venue and its owners in an exclusive hospitality hall of fame. It marks a rapid rise to the top for a bar that opened scarcely more than two years ago but is the culmination of a career dedicated to the Barcelona bar community.
“I only started bartending because I wanted to go to the university,” says Álvarez. “I was studying biological sciences at the University of Barcelona and needed some income to pay for the degree and have a bit of money. By the time I finished my career though, I’d found my place behind the bar instead of in the lab.”
From there, he honed his craft across the city’s bars and restaurants before his break came at Albert Adrià’s 16-seat, 40-plus-course tasting restaurant, 41 Degrees. Soon after, he was heading up the drinks programme for Adrià’s El Barri group, successor to the legendary El Bulli and unfortunately one of the higher-profile Covid casualties.
“Before Sips I worked with the Adrià brothers [Albert and Ferran]. They are two of the most important chefs in Spain and I was head bartender across all of the bars and restaurants in the group for eight years. I did all the bartender training and drinks programmes. I learnt a lot. They were very talented at combining flavours and using techniques in the kitchen that I could apply to the liquid world. They gave me criteria to understand balance and flavours. As an education it was amazing.”
It was when running a drinks consultancy post-El Barri group that he began speaking with Caporale about a bar concept that would eventually become Sips Drinkery House.
“We wanted to create somewhere very casual and fresh, somewhere drinks don’t have to be explained to the guest or where the focus was on the preparation of the cocktail, but we wanted to use the same technology and techniques that you could find in places in London or New York,” says Álvarez. “At the beginning, the main idea that Simone and I had was to create a place that respected the word ‘bar’.”
Captivating concept
Serving sophisticated concepts in an unsophisticated context is a trick at which Álvarez is adept. Drinks arrive in a metal cast of two cupped hands, from a hand-cranked ice shaver or as a cluster of bubbles – always imaginative and always fun. But the bar’s growth has happened in public – from launch the project had already captured the industry’s interest with its first appearance on the 50 Best list coming just months after opening its doors.
“It’s always nice to be liked,” says Álvarez. “When you do something and the audience, the press, the media and the industry are supporting you, it’s an amazing experience and it’s something that pushes us to keep working and fighting for our dream.
“When you’re in the World’s 50 Best Bars, it creates expectations. People expect cocktails to fly from the bar counter to the tables and we can’t do that. That’s why it’s so important to make the guest experience the priority. That’s how you demonstrate that you’re doing things the right way to be the number that you are. The most important thing is to open the bar every day and provide the best experience and the best service for the people sitting at the table.”
And despite being named the world’s best, Sips isn’t sitting still. Plans of an ambitious bar-within-a-bar concept have been rumbling since last year, and now Esencia, a venue that leans into Álvarez’s high-concept culinary background, is ready to finally launch.
“We wanted something more experiential, and that’s where Esencia comes in,” he says. “At Esencia, we take the concept of the tasting menu of a restaurant and translate it into the liquid world.
The idea with Sips Drinkery House and Esencia is to have two very different concepts with the same DNA. Where Sips is casual and fresh, Esencia tries to see the concept of a bar with a chef’s eye. To have a gastronomic vision of what a bar can be but always with the background of a bartender.
The triumph in Singapore and the opening of Esencia mark a full-circle moment for Álvarez, but for all the acclaim and the innovation, he is a bar operator first.
“Awards and recognition support us but when at the end of the month you can pay salaries and invoices, then you’re the king of the world.”
