Tram-Tram

To get to Tram-Tram, you have to leave the neon-lit chaos of the Ramblas and the architectural fever dreams of Eixample behind. You head uphill, into Sarrià—a neighborhood that still feels like the independent village it was before Barcelona swallowed it whole. This is where the old money lives, the kind of people who don’t need to prove anything to anyone. And Tram-Tram is their canteen. It’s a 19th-century townhouse on Carrer Major de Sarrià that feels less like a restaurant and more like the home of a very wealthy, very tasteful uncle who happens to have a genius in the kitchen.

That genius is Isidre Soler. If you care about culinary history, his name carries weight. He was there at the beginning, working alongside Ferran Adrià at El Bulli when the world was just starting to realize that something tectonic was shifting in Spanish cooking. But don’t come here looking for liquid olives or nitrogen-chilled moss. Soler took that world-class discipline and applied it to the things that actually matter: product, season, and soul. Along with his wife, Reyes Lizán, who runs the room with a quiet, sharp-eyed grace, they’ve created a space that is stubbornly, beautifully resistant to trends.

When you walk in, the first thing you notice is the lack of noise. Not silence, but a civilized hum. The dining rooms are intimate, spread across the floors of the old house, but the real prize is the interior patio—a terrace that feels like a secret garden where the city’s humidity can’t reach you. It’s the kind of place where you want to settle in for three hours and let the world outside burn itself down.

The menu is a love letter to the Catalan larder. You start with the navajas—the razor clams. In lesser hands, these are rubbery tubes of grit. Here, they are a revelation: clean, sweet, hitting the palate with the sharp tang of the Mediterranean. People talk about the 'pocket knife' clams here for a reason; they are handled with a surgeon’s precision. Then there is the rice. In Barcelona, everyone claims to have the best rice, but Soler’s versions—often featuring seasonal mushrooms or local seafood—have a depth of flavor that suggests a stock pot that has been simmering since the dawn of time.

If the suckling pig is on the menu, don’t overthink it. Just order it. The skin is rendered down to a glass-like crackle that shatters under the fork, giving way to meat so tender it feels like a personal favor from the chef. It’s traditional, yes, but executed with a level of technical mastery that reminds you why these dishes became classics in the first place.

Is it expensive? It’s not cheap. Is it formal? A little. You probably shouldn’t roll in wearing flip-flops and a tank top. But it lacks the suffocating pretension of the city’s more 'fashionable' spots. The service is professional in the way that’s becoming a lost art—they know when to fill your glass and when to leave you the hell alone.

Tram-Tram is for the grown-ups. It’s for the people who realized long ago that a perfectly executed tasting menu in a quiet garden is worth more than a dozen 'concept' small plates in a room with bad acoustics. It is a reminder that the best way to travel is often to just go slightly off the main map, climb the hill, and find the place where the locals have been hiding the good stuff all along.