While QR codes and AI-powered efficiency dominate headlines, the CEO of Barcelona Wine Bar is doing something radically countercultural: bringing restaurants back to their roots by prioritizing warmth, conversation, and community over convenience.
Adam Halberg wants guests to understand that at its core, Barcelona Wine Bar is an immersive gathering spot for folks to eat, drink, hang out, and truly connect face-to-face with people. “We’re a place to meet people, we’re a place to try new foods, a place to try new drinks. I know that sounds a little bit maybe overly romantic or throwbacky, but, when we talk about what Barcelona is, it’s really what we describe first,” he tells FSR editors on a recent episode of The Restaurant Innovator Podcast.
At first glance, Barcelona Wine Bar is a Spanish tapas restaurant. However, the restaurant’s main identity is all about being “fundamentally old school”—which, in this day and age, feels innovative. Halberg wants his diners to feel like they are a part of a community. He believes that Barcelona Wine Bar is popular not only because of the great food, but because of its authentic hospitality and elevated dining experience.
Halberg envisions Barcelona Wine Bar as an escape from the outside world, including from diner’s phones. The pandemic changed a lot for the restaurant industry, and Halberg feels that there is a hunger for face-to-face interaction, and he doesn’t want technology to interfere with that. He wants to give people back the ability to flex their socializing muscles.
“We’re building restaurants that I oftentimes describe as cinematic. You feel like you have walked into another world. You are fully transported. And then while you’re there, you get to completely immerse yourself in the energy and the music and all the things that you see around you, and all these cool people and everything else,” says Halberg. “So we have to be careful that the technology doesn’t do what in theater you would call breaking the fourth wall.”
While he doesn’t reject technology outright, Halberg believes it should remain invisible. “If you walk up to a host stand and somebody looks at the iPad instead of looking at you in the face, then it’s hurting the experience,” he says.
Halberg feels like the pandemic fundamentally changed how the entire world operates, especially the restaurant industry. “The biggest question coming out of the pandemic is always, what’s the new normal? And for a group like ours, the answer was nobody wants ‘new normal.’ We want normal,” Halberg says.
Halberg has been with Barcelona Wine Bar for almost 18 years. He started off as the culinary director in 2008 when the restaurant group only had five locations in Connecticut. Now, Barcelona Wine Bar has over a dozen locations across the country—yet, people are still surprised when they find out their neighborhood Barcelona Wine Bar isn’t the only one to exist.
“When we talk to people who come to Barcelona in different neighborhoods around the country, they tell us that they don’t think of us as a national group. In fact, most of the time when we’re talking to people, they disbelieve us if we tell them that we’re in another state,” says Halberg.
It’s not that Barcelona is setting out to be anti-chain, it’s more so that each location sets out to appeal to their community as best they can, explains Halberg. “I always tell people, you don’t get to decide what your signature dish is, your guests tell you what your signature dish is. They’re gonna tell you, ‘this is what I come and eat all the time,’” he continues. “There’s a feeling like we’re part of the community.”
Barcelona Wine Bar’s sister concept, Corsica Wine Bar, opened its first location in Denver last April, and recently opened its second location in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C, in September. Corsica is a fresh chapter that still incorporates a small plates menu, but has unique, untraditional twists of its own, says Halberg. “We have a concept which is called spruzzo, where the moment that you get sat, the moment that somebody comes over to say hello at the table, they’re actually holding a bottle of wine already. As if you just walked into their home,” he says.
Combining what works for both restaurants helps them succeed and flourish. The goal of Barcelona and Corsica is also not to spend a million dollars, says Halberg. The experience you get at both of these restaurants is supposed to be “accessible” and comfortable.
READ MORE:
Inside Corsica Wine Bar’s Countercultural Restaurant Revolution
How Barcelona Wine Bar Appeals to Younger Diners with Authentic Spaces
The Barcelona Wine Bar Blueprint for Success
The key to all of this success? Halberg says that for Barcelona, it’s all about knowing what works exactly for them, which won’t work for other business models. Keeping it local and finding great staff members is easy, says Halberg. “Finding the talent is far less of an issue than the cost of getting open in the first place and then building out your strategy,” Halberg explains. “And honestly, I worry most about independent owner-operator restaurants. They’re what makes our neighborhoods vibrant. We don’t go with Barcelona, Corsica, we don’t go into the malls and big new developments where every national group has put an outpost.”
Combating cost increases is another challenge for the restaurateur to worry about and not the diner, says Halberg. “How do we lean into that in a way that we can control our costs so that we don’t have to pass them on to you? That’s on us. And it’s hard,” he mentions.
Raising menu prices is the last resort, so going through every option before opting to do that is the way Barcelona Wine Bar operates. Whatever doesn’t take advantage of the customer is best, says Halberg. “I think we’ve raised some items in total maybe up 3 percent, 5 percent over the past six years.”
Uniqueness and making people the focal point is paramount at Barcelona Wine Bar. “It’s not going to be just a replica of the same chains over and over and over again. And I think that’s fantastic,” says Halberg.
As for what’s next, Halberg says the BWB team typically opens one to two restaurants per year. However, the focus isn’t necessarily on hitting specific unit count numbers, but on finding the right neighborhoods where the brand can integrate seamlessly in the community. “The second that you start thinking too much about scale, the second you start thinking about that number that you’re after to try to hit, you start changing the way you operate in order to achieve that goal, and you lose,” Halberg explains. “Our goal is how do we fit into this neighborhood and make the people here wildly happy?”
Listen to Adam Halberg’s other hospitality hot takes on The Restaurant Innovator Podcast
