Albert Adrià opens ice cream shop on the Rambla
The Enigma chef is soon to open Gellato Collection, near Torrons Vicens, on Barcelona’s La Rambla
Albert Adrià, the chef of the Enigma restaurant, with a Michelin star second best chef in the world according to The Best Chef Awards ranking, will open an ice cream shop on Rambla 134, next to the Torrons Vicens museum store, and next to what used to be the Club Capitol theatre. It will be called Gelato Collection.
How did it occur to Albert Adrià to open an ice cream shop? “During the pandemic, my pastry chef, Alfredo [Machado], worked at one of the most important ice cream brands. At that time, we were in a precarious situation. But when we got out of the pandemic and were back at the restaurant, one day I asked Alfredo to make ice cream for us to eat. He made some and it tasted amazing! Immediately, I told him that we had to set up an ice cream shop”, he explains. One day, talking to my friend Àngel Velasco, from Torrons Vicens, with whom I have been collaborating for a long time, we touched on the subject of icecream. ’Angel owned a shop on La Rambla, as well as a permit for making ice cream.
Albert Adrià has been collaborating with Torrons Vicens for ten years, and they first surprised and broke with everything that had been done until then with the innovative gin and tonic nougat. Then, another unusual nougat would come, the Lay’s Gourmet fries. And so, with dozens of tastes. “This year, I made one with cream and walnuts, which was my mother’s favourite, and another with tangerine and yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit that looks like a lemon and is also grown here,” he explains.
He will also make innovative flavours in his ice cream shop – which is due to open in the middle of June – and wants to turn ice cream into a pleasure that can be eaten all year round, as has already happened with nougat (torrons). “We want to make a sort of a bank of icecream recipes, and we will start with the most traditional ones. In fact, we are already working on many”, explains Adrià, who says that they will group the tastes into four families. The first family will be the classics, such as vanilla icecream (“we’re working on a white and yellow base, with egg yolk”), chocolate, pistachio (“we’re trying an unroasted pistachio icecream, which is very fresh, and another toasted”) and strawberry. Then there are the seasonal icecreams and sorbets, with fruits and herbs of the season (“a fig sorbet and a fig leaf icecream”). A third category will be signature icecreams (with rose, lychee and raspberry). A final category will be for adults, which will be with alcohol, in the style of their cocktails. In the ice cream shop, there will be twenty icecreams, which will vary.
“We want to investigate. I have always tried to go a little further, but at the same time, we will emphasise our philosophy, the work done for almost 40 years.”
feature GASTRONOMY
Enigma, a joy in the Eixample
Albert Adrià (trained at El Bulli with his brother Ferran) practically lives in the Michelin-starred Enigma restaurant. “The Enigma team is made up of sixty people, we serve forty customers every evening”, he explains. Every day, they make more than 1,200 preparations, because the tasting menu has 32 dishes. The Enigma has a futuristic image, with translucent whitish curtains that act as walls and form spaces where the kitchens and dining rooms are, and the ceiling is like a floating cloud. The space was designed by RCR Arquitectes (2017 Pritzker Prize).