Masa has a proposition, and it delivers it with total consistency: one of the longest natural wine lists in Barcelona, poured by glass and bottle from across Europe, inside a pared-back retro room in Poblenou that fills with a young crowd from the moment it opens and takes walk-ins over reservations. The international press loves it. We keep not loving it, and a year of reflection hasn't dislodged the reason. The list's length is not the same as the list's quality: too many pours land on the cloudy, funky, faintly forgettable end of natural, offered as though the fault were the point. The food is competent and generic — good ingredients, correct execution, a kimchi grilled cheese that is the one thing we'd order again, and very little else that survives to the next morning. And the whole enterprise is wrapped in a layer of design and self-awareness thick enough to feel like a performance you're expected to appreciate. None of this makes Masa bad. It makes it a place we admire from a distance while going somewhere else. If the list is the reason you came, you will find things worth drinking. If you came to eat, you were misinformed.
Address · Carrer de Pallars, 154, Barcelona 08005 Type · Wine Bar District · Sant MartíBudget · 35€/pax
The 2025 Review
A wine-bar concept with more styling than flavor
Masa is a very defined proposition: natural wines, a design-forward “living room” vibe, and a small-plates menu meant to keep the fridges moving. Gastronomically, it sits in modern Mediterranean tapas with global touches—vegetable plates, crudos, ceviche-style ideas, porchetta, a pasta or two—snackable, quick, built for sharing.
On our side, the food didn’t justify the noise. The tapas felt very regular: decent ingredients, correct execution, but rarely the kind of bite we’d remember the next day. And the whole experience is wrapped in a thick layer of hipster design and self-awareness that can feel exhausting, like we’re meant to admire the concept as much as we’re meant to eat.
The wine is the headline and it’s unapologetically natural. That can be fun, but here it leans hard into the more “suspect” end of the spectrum—cloudy, funky, sometimes simply forgettable. In the end: not terrible, just not a place we’d go back to for the food
