1,200 reservations in less than 24 hours and the fortune to get a table in the new best pizzeria in Europe. Last night, both at the Sartoria Panatieri on Provença street and on Encarnació street, number one since Wednesday in the European ranking of the prestigious Italian guide 50 Top Pizza, there was no room for a pin. “We have had to limit reservations only to the web, because we cannot cope with answering the phone,” explained chef Rafa Panatieri, the creator of these establishments together with Jorge Sastre, without leaving the command table for a second.
While the wood-fired oven was burning non-stop, taking out pizzas, he was giving them the finishing touches: one with mortadella with pistachios, spinach, raisins and ricotta cream ready to serve, another with cream of piquillo peppers, anchovies, young garlic and piparras already On my way to the table, next out of the oven? One of his most curious recipes, with sobrassada, honey, mozzarella, wild fennel and Mahón cheese.
The pace of work was frantic, despite the fact that the team had celebrated the award the day before. Even so, it was not noticeable, since everyone carried out their tasks seriously and firmly, as if it were any other Thursday.
We sit at the table in this space, with an industrial style and vintage decoration, and dinner begins with those delicious seasoned Gordal olives that are hard to find in other places in Barcelona.
We continue to open our mouths with the focaccia with olive oil and rosemary, an indisputable companion to the delicious artisan sausages that are prepared in this house with pork from the recovered Gascón breed, raised on an organic farm in Lleida. Loin head, cured loin, bacon, braised ham… You can choose just one, but in our case we want them all.
Then come some of the dishes that, although they are not pizza, have clearly helped Sartoria Panatieri to position itself as the best pizzeria in Europe. For example, the burrata with basil and seasonal leaves or that excellent roasted porchetta with hollandaise suckling pig sauce that only has good produce as a secret. And that is the great obsession of these chefs, proximity and local ingredients, hence their slogan ‘from farm to pizza’.
Obviously we cannot leave there without trying the star pizza of the moment, the one with ‘Roasted cherry tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil hollandaise’ which, although it is a simple margharita, has managed to win this year the ‘Best Pizza 2023’ award. ‘ in the 50 Top Pizza. The tomato sauce, concentrated and cooked for hours at a low temperature, is an explosion of flavor, now we understand why many Neapolitans threw their hands up during the gala on Wednesday.
The party doesn’t end here. We take a taxi and head to the best bar in the world, the Paradiso cocktail bar (Rera Palau, 4), to try to understand if combining both proposals is synonymous with the ‘new perfect evening’. We break through the pastrami fridge, and ‘boom’, there’s the cheery Paradiso team shaking the shaker. As always, they are full, something that was already happening long before the greatest international recognition came to them.
To end the night, we chose two cocktails: the ‘On fire’, one of our favorites on the menu this season (although we don’t like whiskey), smoky, toasted and sweet, and the Cloud, with mezcal, hibiscus and amaro , refreshing and penetrating. Seeing how they prepare them is quite a spectacle, since if in the case of the first they are able to smoke your drink in streaming, in the case of the second the edible cloud flies up to situate itself just above the glass.
The experience is complete and living it is worth it. So we can already confirm it: the perfect plan is in Barcelona and it costs about 50 euros per person.
