Where to eat and drink in Barcelona in 2025

Coffee, cakes, booze, and food in my favourite city in Spain

Welcome to Braise’s first issue of ‘annually optimised content’ — a.k.a. a shameless re-hash of a post I wrote last year, albeit updated substantially.

I paid my annual pilgrimage to Barcelona last week, and when I didn’t spend my time looking at an awful lot of phones I did my best to eat and drink my way round the city too, all in the name of an improved and updated guide for you lot.

My relationship with Barcelona is a slightly odd one. I’ve never lived there, though I know people who have. In fact, I’ve never even visited it for as much as a week at a time, or even ever truly gone for a holiday.

Instead it’s the city my job keeps taking me back to, my annual pilgrimage to February’s Mobile World Congress tech trade show always a highlight of my work calendar. That’s less for the show and more for the city, to be clear, and most of all for everything I eat and drink while I’m there.

Enough pre-amble. These are the places I eat, drink, and try to be merry in the snatches of time I get around work, accumulated from almost a decade of trips here. I write with no greater authority than a regular visitor, and so make no pretence that this list is definitive - but that means there’s always more for me to try when February next rolls around.

Where to snack

Jon Cake

Right now the original Jon Cake is actually closed, but their tourist-friendly cheesecakes are available at two other locations. Expect a short queue, but it moves fast, so don’t let that put you off.

Expect a range of flavours available every day, from the excellent original to more challenging cheeses (manchego, gorgonzola) or sweeter variants (salted caramel, pistachio), with new options rotating in regularly. You order by weight, though be warned: they’re not keen on cutting small slices, so don’t expect to come away with tiny tasters of every option.

Funky Bakers

Funky Bakers does its own cheesecake that I’m told rivals Jon Cake’s without the queue, which is an appeal in itself. I’ve not tried that, but have tried a few of the other pastries and sandwiches both here and at the larger Funky Deli location.

The focus is on creative viennoiserie, so nothing here feels especially local in style — I could see the same menu popping up in London easily enough — but the quality is excellent. If the colossal pistachio pain au chocolat is on, then do yourself a favour and start there.

Forn de Pa Vilamala

This tiny, traditional bakery does an awful lot right — there’s a reason it supplies local restaurants including El Xampanyet and Bar Brutal — but the star attraction is the coca de crema.

This dense puck of crisp layered pastry filled with crème pattisiere only takes two or three messy bites to disappear, just enough time for you to start wondering why you didn’t buy two of them.

Where to caffeinate

Nomad Coffee Bar