From the street it is a small pastrami shop in Barcelona's El Born. Walk past the sandwich counter, pull open the door of a walk-in refrigerator, and you step into a room that looks like the inside of a whale, a curved wooden ceiling arching over a Carrara-marble bar. This is Paradiso, the bar that in 2022 became the first outside London or New York ever to be named The World's Best Bar.
We rank Paradiso No. 2 on our guide to the 25 best speakeasies in the world, and it is the closest thing on the list to a rival for the top spot. Where our No. 1, Handshake, wins on quiet precision, Paradiso wins on spectacle without ever sacrificing the quality of the liquid. It is the most gloriously theatrical hidden door in the world, and the drinks live up to the entrance.
The fridge in the pastrami shop
The entrance is one of the great speakeasy reveals. At Carrer de Rera Palau 4, you enter what appears to be an ordinary pastrami bar, all white tiles and deli counter. The way through is a full-size retro refrigerator door; open it and the cold-store facade gives way to the warm, cavernous cocktail bar behind. It is a proper piece of misdirection, and it never stops delighting, precisely because the contrast between the humble front and the extraordinary room behind is so complete.
That theatricality is not a gimmick bolted onto a good bar; it is the organising principle of the whole place. Paradiso treats the "wow effect" as a protagonist, from the moment you push through the fridge door to the drinks that arrive under bell jars and in hand-blown vessels. But crucially, the surprise of the entrance is a promise the bar then keeps, because what follows is genuinely world-class.
Giacomo Giannotti and the making of Paradiso
Paradiso is the vision of Giacomo Giannotti, born in 1988 in Carrara, on the Tuscan coast. The name is a family inheritance: he grew up around his family's business, Gelateria Paradiso, and carried the name to Barcelona. After hospitality school he moved into bartending, spent around four years in London, and then relocated to Spain, learning the trade in hotel bars before striking out on his own. He was named Best Barman of Spain in 2017, and the accolades for the bar followed quickly.
Paradiso opened at the end of 2015, and it climbed steadily. It won the One to Watch award in 2017, reached No. 19 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2020 and No. 3 in 2021, before taking the No. 1 spot in 2022, the first time in the ranking's history that the world's best bar sat outside London or New York. Giannotti accepted the award alongside co-owner Margarita Sader. Since then it has remained a fixture near the top, No. 4 in 2023, No. 10 in 2024, and back to No. 4 in 2025, with a No. 9 placing on the inaugural Europe's 50 Best Bars list in 2026. Few bars anywhere have sustained that level of consistency.
Giannotti has since built a small empire around the original room, opening the Italian-aperitivo bar Galileo in Barcelona in 2020, extending the Paradiso name to Ibiza and Dubai, and marking the bar's tenth anniversary in 2026 with a book, Paradiso: From Dream to Legacy. Yet the El Born original remains the beating heart of it all.
Inside the whale
The room itself is one of the most photographed bar interiors in the world, and in person it is even better. The World's 50 Best describes it as resembling the inside of a whale, a curved, sinuous wooden ceiling that seems to breathe around you. Giannotti has spoken of shaping the wood to recall the sea of Barcelona and using Carrara marble for the bar as a nod to his Tuscan origins; the overall effect draws frequent comparisons to Gaudí and Catalan modernism. It is a space designed to instil a sense of wonder, and it succeeds.
That design serves the drinking. The room is warm and enveloping rather than cold and minimalist, which suits a bar whose whole ethos is generosity of experience. Paradiso deliberately draws people of every generation, not just cocktail obsessives, and the interior is a big reason why: you do not need to know anything about mixology to feel, the moment the fridge door closes behind you, that you have arrived somewhere special.
Storytelling menus and the Paradiso Lab
Paradiso reinvents its menu around a new theme roughly every year, turning the drinks list into a piece of narrative design. Recent concepts have included "Mysteries of the Universe," which built each cocktail around a scientific or cosmic mystery, and, for the bar's tenth-anniversary year, an art-inspired menu called "Oltre." These are not gimmicks so much as frameworks that give the team a reason to keep pushing technique in new directions.
Behind the drinks sits the Paradiso Lab, a dedicated research-and-development operation with a strong focus on sustainability. It is here that the bar develops the supercooling, clarification, fermentation and house-cordial techniques that define its style, and the sustainability programme, working with the Sustainable Restaurant Association, is woven through the ingredient sourcing. The lab is what allows Paradiso to be theatrical and serious at the same time: the spectacle is always underpinned by real technical work.
What to drink
The signature is the Supercool Martini, developed by Giannotti in 2019 and arguably the most famous drink to come out of the bar. It relies on a supercooling technique in which a liquid is kept liquid below zero, then triggered to freeze the instant it touches a frozen olive, forming a small stalagmite of ice in the glass in front of you. It is theatre and technique fused into a single serve, and it is precisely the kind of thing Paradiso does better than anyone.
Beyond it, the list rewards curiosity. Kryptonite pairs Catalan Gin Mare with shiso, lemongrass, grapefruit cordial and chocolate bitters. Nazca is built on Spanish brandy with an apple-and-grape leche de tigre and corn cordial, using entirely Spanish products. There is a paloma milk punch finished with a koji rim, and, depending on the current menu, dramatic serves that arrive under a plume of smoke or in bespoke, hand-blown glassware. The drinks are inventive and boundary-pushing, but they are built to be enjoyed rather than merely admired.
How to visit
Paradiso does not take advance reservations for its main bar. Instead, you scan a QR code at the door to join a virtual queue and are notified when a table opens, which frees you to wait elsewhere in the bustle of El Born rather than standing in line. It is a smart, modern answer to the perennial problem of a hidden bar that everyone now wants to visit. Expect it to be busy; this is one of the most sought-after bars in Europe.
In keeping with our policy, treat specifics like opening hours, the exact queue mechanics and cocktail prices as things to confirm before you go, since a bar this popular adjusts its systems regularly. What will not change is the essential experience: a pastrami-shop front, a refrigerator door, a whale-belly room, and a menu of technically daring, theatrically presented cocktails that has kept Paradiso near the summit of the world rankings for years.
The Barcelona effect
Paradiso's 2022 win was not just a personal triumph for Giacomo Giannotti; it was a milestone for Barcelona and for the wider cocktail world. For the first time, the title of World's Best Bar went to a city other than London or New York, and Barcelona has since become one of the most important cocktail capitals on earth, regularly placing multiple bars in the global top ten. Paradiso is the flagship of that movement, the bar that signalled the drinks world's attention had broadened beyond its traditional Anglo-American axis, and it did so from behind a refrigerator door in El Born.
Giannotti has built on that platform without diluting the original. He opened the Italian-aperitivo bar Galileo in Barcelona in 2020, extended the Paradiso name to Ibiza and Dubai, and marked the tenth anniversary with a book and a continuing programme of international masterclasses. Yet the El Born room remains the reference point, the place the whole story radiates from, and the reason drinkers still make a pilgrimage to Carrer de Rera Palau.
What a visit feels like
For all the awards and technique, the thing that stays with most first-time visitors is the sheer sense of theatre. You arrive at a pastrami counter, half-convinced you have the wrong address; you open a fridge; and then the room unfolds around you, warm wood curving overhead, a drink arriving that freezes in front of your eyes or emerges from a cloud of smoke. Paradiso is generous with wonder in a way that many serious cocktail bars are not, and it welcomes casual drinkers as warmly as connoisseurs. That accessibility, spectacle that anyone can enjoy, backed by liquid that satisfies the most demanding palate, is the quality that keeps it near the top of every credible list, ours included.
The verdict
Paradiso is the bar that proved the cocktail world's centre of gravity had shifted, and it remains the definitive example of the speakeasy as spectacle. The hidden fridge door, the whale-belly room, the supercooled martini forming before your eyes: these are the images that launched a thousand imitators. But what keeps Paradiso at No. 2 rather than sliding into pure showmanship is the substance behind the show, the lab, the sustainability work, the annually reinvented menus, the sheer quality of the liquid. It is a must-visit, and one of the few bars that genuinely lives up to its own legend.
Compare it with the rest of the field in our 25 best speakeasies in the world, or explore more of the city in our Barcelona guide.