While we were all stuffing our collective faces with fried foods on sticks, the North Loop went and got itself a new wine bar. Barcelona Wine Bar quietly opened doors on 508 Washington, right across the street from Cuzzy’s.
This wine bar is part of a national collection, the original opened on the East Coast in 1996. But it has slow-rolled its expansion, and now has just over 20 locations around the country. This is the first in the Midwest.
Smartly, they’ve brought on chef Alex Dayton. The founder of Aliment Pasta seems at home in this kitchen, which focuses on Spanish ingredients and tapas. I asked specifically whether they were going to have such a talent just making company recipes, and they assured me that, while of course some dishes are the same from restaurant to restaurant, the food menu is by and large Alex’s. He’s in charge of adding dishes, changing with the seasons, and making it a uniquely local version of Barcelona Wine Bar.
The room, which is comfortably sophisticated and has a good energy, is also a unique design. Not a cookie cutter wine bar with the same cork and bottle photos on walls from DC to AZ, this location has art specific to MN and design elements that celebrate the pine timbers found in the old building.
The wine bar boasts some 400+ Spanish, French, Mediterranean, and Latin American wines, both by the bottle and the glass. They consider themselves fans of organic wines, love playing in lesser-known regions, and feel it’s important to showcase family-run producers. Gretchen Thomas, Barcelona’s chief creative officer, told me that they’ve earned Best Organic Wine List in the World awards, but that was never the intention, to build toward that kind of a focused list. “We just kept looking for the best quality, wherever we could find it. And it happens that people who care that much about how they produce wine, what goes into it, they make pretty great wines.” She’s been cultivating this wine program for 18 years, and it shows. The bottles on the main menu run mostly in the $40 range, with by the glass portions of 3 oz. and 6 oz. running from $5-$13.
The menu is built for drinking, snacking, passing plates, stealing bites—all your favorite pastimes. You’ll find a nice selection of snacks and cheeses to build your charcuterie board (happiness is letting me pick my cheeses). Roughly 30 tapas dishes run from patatas bravas and jamon and manchego croquetas to swordfish a la plancha and beyond. Small bites with simple preparations, but big flavors. There are a few salads, some larger plates like this vegetarian paella, and a few desserts too. The olive oil cake I tried was crazy good.
There are cocktails, regional Spanish gin and tonics, and sangria too. You can make reservations, but they are very open to wander-ins. They kept saying, “We don’t like to get in the way of a good time,” and I thought that was a good vibe for this spot.
Barcelona is open, every day starting at 4 p.m. And here’s a big buried lede, their kitchen will stay open late, until 1 a.m. on Tuesday through Saturday, and midnight on Sunday and Monday. Look for brunch to start sometime down the road.
Stephanie March
Food and Dining editor Stephanie March writes and edits Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s Eat + Drink section. She can also be heard Saturdays on her myTalk107.1 radio show, Weekly Dish, where she talks about the Twin Cities food scene.
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August 29, 2024
9:22 PM