.Barcelona, like Madrid, is now flooded with bars that do nothing but serve gin tonics. There’s Bobby Gin in Gracia, with a bouncer at the door who radios your group in to a bar bathed in dark woods and soft lights. Xixbar in Poble Sec, with its cave-like corners and piercing florescent lights, has a store connected to the bar selling something like 50 types of gin from around the world. And my favorite from the cool crowd, Pesca Salada, a tiny bar tucked down a side street in the Raval, with erratic hours, a ceiling paved in metal plates and a bartender with a killer fro and a heavy hand with the hard stuff.
At all of these spots mixologists charge heavy tariffs for making tiny tweaks—essentially garnishes—to the average gin tonic experience. It’s fun to drink G and Ts with slivers of fresh ginger, say, or a handful of crushed Sichuan peppercorns (just as it was eye-opening to drink that first tricked-out number from José Andrés many years ago), but you don’t drink gin tonics out of a desire for creative cocktailery; you drink it for that bracing bittersweet dance between aromatic juniper-charged gin and the quinine bite of good tonic. In my mind, a gin and tonic should only have four ingredients: gin, tonic, ice, and a twist of citrus.