Els Quatre Gats

In 1899, a seventeen-year-old Pablo Picasso walked into this cafe on Carrer de Montsio and held his first solo exhibition in the main room. He'd been frequenting the place for barely a year, sketching the regulars and soaking up the bohemian atmosphere. The exhibition didn't make him famous — that would take a few more years — but it marked the moment a teenage art student began behaving like a serious artist. He even designed the menu cover, which is still reproduced today.

Els Quatre Gats — "The Four Cats" — opened in 1897 on the ground floor of Casa Marti, a neo-Gothic building designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch in 1896. The name is a Catalan expression meaning "just a few people," referring to the outsiders and eccentrics who saw themselves as too interesting for mainstream society. The founders intended it as Barcelona's answer to Le Chat Noir in Paris: a bohemian cabaret where artists, writers, architects, and musicians could drink, argue, and show their work.

And they came. Gaudi was a regular. So were architects Puig i Cadafalch and Domenech i Montaner, sculptor Julio Gonzalez, painters Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusinol. Casas painted a famous image of himself and the cafe's owner Pere Romeu riding a tandem bicycle, which hung on the wall. The cafe hosted puppet shows, piano concerts, art exhibitions, and the kind of heated arguments about aesthetics that could last until dawn.

The original cafe closed in 1903 after just six years, but it was faithfully restored and reopened in 1978. Today you can eat a meal in the same room where Picasso showed his early work, surrounded by reproduction artwork and Gothic arches. The menu is solid Catalan cooking at tourist-area prices.