There's a café in Barcelona that has something to say about ice cream
Surely in the past few days, you've seen an ice cream stick on your Instagram feed featuring the facial features of Michelangelo's David, or a vanilla duck melting in espresso, or a cookie ice cream branded with a Tarot card.
Otsu opened a couple of years ago in Barcelona's gentrified Poblenou neighborhood, a converted former industrial hub. Its founder is Fer Villanueva, who worked for years in technology and marketing before turning to cooking professionally. It has everything a contemporary café needs: specialty coffee from April, the renowned Danish roaster, macha, baked goods, Japanese-inspired cuisine, and revisited local cuisine. It's open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for lunch or breakfast.
We, who often talk about courage and innovation in the world of gelato, couldn't help but be interested. Otsu's gelato is experimental in a different way than we're used to thinking: it's not an experiment in flavor; the main flavor of its gelato is vanilla, with at most a hint of strawberry and a white chocolate coating in the Summer David, the gelato inspired by Michelangelo. The experimentation lies in the design and in the sense of wonder the gelato is intended to create.
A direction that perfectly matches this café and its inspiration: design and marketing, as well as substance. Because the selection of baked goods, the Japanese-inspired cuisine, the specialty coffees, and the matcha are apparently impeccable; after all, Otsu in Japanese can be translated as "properly done."
Combining expert craftsmanship with a pleasing aesthetic—is this perhaps the future of ice cream? Would it be so unthinkable?
What are Otsu's ice creams like?
For example, there were five Tarot card-themed cookie ice creams, and in an interview with Traveller, the chef explained how the game she created for the service worked: instead of choosing their own flavor, each customer randomly received one of five creations inspired by five Arcana. The idea was born from the ritual of the cards themselves, from that curiosity that drives one to choose a card at random to see which figure will appear. In the same interview, Fer explains how the idea came to her while leafing through a Taschen book: "The illustrations, the level of detail, and the beauty of each card made me want to flip through it again and again," Fer explains. She wanted to convey that same feeling in the food.
Other unusual ice creams include the duck, inspired by the little mud ducks that Chinese children shape and place in the snow, and banana bread, served with a scoop of banana-shaped ice cream flavored with toasted butter.
All these inspirations come to Fer and his staff during the Weekend Specials, a pretty good marketing idea. Every weekend, the staff chooses to delve into a culinary technique they're not experts at: there was the focaccia weekend, the cotton candy weekend, and even the gelato weekend. Café patrons, curious to know what's new this week, flock to Otsu every Saturday and line up.
