Els Quatre Gats

Els Quatre Gats — 'The Four Cats' — is a café-restaurant in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona occupying one of the city's finest Modernista buildings, designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch and completed in 1896. The café was conceived as a gathering place for Barcelona's artistic and bohemian elite at the turn of the twentieth century, and it fulfilled that role with remarkable success: Pablo Picasso held his first public exhibition here in February 1900, and the menu was illustrated with a lithograph he designed for the establishment. The original patrons included artists, poets, and musicians whose names now feature in the history of Catalan Modernisme. Today the building is a listed heritage monument and the café continues to operate, serving Catalan and Mediterranean cuisine to a mix of locals and visitors who come as much for the architecture as for the food. The dining room is a monument to the Art Nouveau aesthetic — wrought iron, ceramics, dark wood, and reproductions of works by Ramón Casas (whose original cycling portrait of himself and Pere Romeu once hung here). The kitchen serves traditional Catalan dishes and a menú del día at lunch that offers reasonable value in a remarkable setting. The quality of the cooking is competent rather than ambitious, and the experience is understood primarily as cultural and historical rather than gastronomic.