Albert Adrià and his pastry chef Alfredo Machado opened their most popular gastronomic project, Gelato Collection, on Las Ramblas in Barcelona yesterday. It is an ice cream parlor that captures the spirit and technical background of signature restaurants like Enigma to bring them to an avant-garde ice cream parlor that, for now, will only open in the afternoons. The establishment will offer around 60 proposals of which you can already try around twenty, and with an interior design inspired by perfume shops and jewelry stores. It is located right next to the Torrons Vicens store and connects with it inside.

The ice cream menu is presented as a collection of flavors divided into four large families: Classics, such as Catalan cream, “parfait-style vanilla like we make it in the restaurant,” explains Alfredo Machado, nuts such as Iranian pistachio, hydrated for 24 hours to make ice cream from pistachio milk; Adults, based on well-known cocktails such as margarita, piña colada and negroni; Author, creations from the universe of Albert Adrià, with combinations of ingredients inspired by Pierre Hermé Ispahan’s classic (raspberries, lychees, and rose); and seasonal.

As Alfredo Machado himself tells us, the ice creams “are low in sugar so that the product has a lot of intensity and more strength. We also want them to be smooth, without toppings. At most, at the time of service, we grate some of our citrus on the ice cream to give more aromatic power.” The ice cream is whipped every day, Machado continues, so it will not be stored, and the Boquería is the main supplier of raw materials to the ice cream shop, which distributes its ice creams on two display benches with different serving temperatures, one for creams, and another for sorbets.

The objective of Gelato Collection is to make a difference through a high-end ice cream parlor, whose interior design is carried out by the El Equipo Creativo studio, which has designed restaurants such as Tickets and Pakta. However, in this first stage the ice cream menu is less risky, they acknowledge, and they will make it progressively more complex. In these first weeks of opening, interest is focused on the public becoming familiar with the establishment’s proposal, so seasonal products such as apricot or cherry sorbets will have more prominence. However, even in the most seemingly simple ice creams and sorbets, “we have taken the techniques from restaurants like Tickets and Enigma and brought them to the ice cream parlor to treat fruit and nuts differently.” In the lemon sorbet, for example, the skin and albedo of the citrus are played with the desire to offer a different experience.