Cocktails with history: what was drunk in Barcelona in 1909
In 1909, Barcelona was a city in turmoil. Modernism adorned its facades. Artists debated in the cafes. And in the bars of the Raval, amidst smoke and conversation, drinks were served that today we would call cocktails, although they had other names then.
Barcelona, 1909: a city that already knew how to mix
There's a fact that surprises many: Barcelona was one of the first European cities with a well-established cocktail culture. It wasn't Paris or London. It was here, in this port city open to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, where American influences arrived earlier and took deeper root.
As early as 1903, the Trocadero restaurant advertised in La Vanguardia a bartender who had come from Victoria, a high-class bar in New York, with a letter from "American drinks. Cocktails, Slops, Punches, etc. Made by the book."That same year that the London Bar opened its doors, the following was published in Barcelona: Bartender's Manual, which described in detail the "American drinks" that were beginning to fill the city's counters.
Two years later, in 1911, Ignacio Domenech would publish here The Art of the Modern Cocktail MakerThe most important treatise on cocktails written in Spain up to that time. Barcelona didn't discover cocktails late. It was documenting them when others were still ignoring them.
"Barcelona is one of the few European cities with a genuine cocktail tradition."
François Monti — beverage historian and author specializing in cocktails
The drinks that defined an era
Absinthe: the spirit of the bohemians
Before the London Bar existed, absinthe was already the drink of the Raval. Santiago Rusiñol, Ramon Casas, and other Catalan Modernist artists—many of whom spent long periods in Paris—drank it in public as a statement of intent. Large glasses of greenish liquid, syrup, and a piece of ice. Liquid art for turbulent times.
When the London Bar opened in 1909, absinthe was still the drink of choice for those who wanted to stand out. And in this bar, almost everyone wanted to be different.
Vermouth: the aperitif that Barcelona made its own
Vermouth wasn't born in Barcelona, but Barcelona embraced it like no other city. At the beginning of the 20th century, the aperitif culture was deeply rooted in the Raval neighborhood and throughout the city. People drank it before meals, they drank it to reflect, they drank it to simply be. Vermouth wasn't just a drink: it was a social ritual.
He still is today. And at the London Bar, he's still behind the bar.
The "American drinks": when the cocktail arrived from the other side of the Atlantic
At the beginning of the 20th century, ordering a cocktail in Barcelona was like ordering a American drinkThe influence of New York and Havana bars arrived through the ports, with travelers, with returning emigrants. Punches, cobblers, fizzes, toddies. Mixtures that sounded like modernity, progress, the world.
The Manhattan was the most mentioned cocktail in the chronicles of Barcelona in the 20s. A witness from that time described it as "the jazz band of liquors": urban, syncopated, impossible to ignore.
Champagne: the toast of power and bohemianism
In Barcelona in 1909, champagne was a status symbol, but also a symbol of celebration regardless of social class. It was drunk with equal enthusiasm at grand banquets and in dives. The artists who frequented the London Bar and the bars of the Raval district mixed it without hesitation with other drinks, anticipating what decades later we would call spritzes o champagne cocktails.
A century later, the story continues in the cup
Barcelona's cocktail scene has come a long way since those first "American drinks" of 1903. It has survived wars, the prohibition of liquor during the Franco regime, changing trends, and economic crises. And at the London Bar, that journey is palpable in every corner: in the art nouveau moldings, in the wooden bar, in the atmosphere that hasn't changed because it doesn't need to.
Today we serve author cocktails They draw from that tradition without copying it. Each glass we prepare has behind it more than a hundred years of history of this place and this city. Not as nostalgia, but as a story.
Come and try it tonight!
Carrer Nou de la Rambla 34, El Raval · Barcelona