Learn Modernist Spanish Cuisine in Barcelona

Where the elBulli cooks actually landed. Disfrutar, opened by three chefs out of that kitchen, was named the world's best restaurant in 2024, and the diaspora around it makes this the densest scene the cuisine has — denser than the city we would actually send you to learn it in.

This cuisine’s most famous kitchen stood in a cove. ElBulli stood above Cala Montjoi, near Roses on the Costa Brava. Ferran Adrià joined its kitchen in 1984 and took full charge in 1987, and from there came the foams and the spherification it made famous. Restaurant magazine’s list named it the best restaurant in the world five times, in 2002 and every year from 2006 to 2009. It served its last meals in 2011, closing on 30 July, and became a foundation for creative cooking. Its cooks carried the work on. Today the craft is most alive in Barcelona, where three of them, Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch and Mateu Casañas, opened Disfrutar in December 2014; in 2024 it was named the world’s best restaurant.

Barcelona, Spain

Stand in the scene the elBulli cooks scattered into, and learn the technique at a bench in it.

Season: Year-round · Enthusiast -> Professional

The densest scene the cuisine has: this is where the elBulli cooks landed, and the restaurant three of them opened was named the world's best in 2024. There is a generation above you here and one below. ⚠ It is a scene of kitchens, not of classrooms — two schools serve it, and we hold a commercial interest in one of them, disclosed on this page.

Living scene

Mecca

Named masters

Verified schools

Schools in Barcelona

Researched by hand against each school's own course pages · Arnaud Callier. No school paid to be listed.

We work togetherPhotographs from the school

Vakuum by Martin Lippo

Classroom courses and online modules — sous-vide and low temperature, foams, sodas and siphon work, spherification, textures and texturizers, liquid nitrogen

Where: Passatge de Centelles, Barcelona
Format: Classroom in Barcelona; online video modules, 8 months' access
Taught in: Spanish; English or French only as a private course
You leave with: Online: course certificate signed by Chef Martin Lippo
Price: €580

Martin Lippo's own laboratory and training school in Barcelona, where he teaches the modernist toolkit hands-on. Enrolment is open to anyone — no CV, no invitation, no stage to win. The classroom courses run in Spanish; when we read his site on 8 October 2026, every classroom session it listed, priced from EUR 380, had already run — the last in May 2026 — with no new date shown. English or French is a private course, quoted by email. The online modules are in English at EUR 80-95, or EUR 386 for the full foams pack. Checked on martinlippo.com, 1 September 2026. He is here for the city rather than for the technique. The same lab is the pick under New culinary techniques & technologies, which is where the toolkit itself is the subject — if it is the tools you want rather than the movement, start there.

Photographs from the school

Sent by the school

Vakuum by Martin Lippo sent these when I wrote to ask whether this page described the school correctly. They are the school's own photographs, published with its permission and credited to it — and they do not move it up the page: where it sits was decided from its own course pages, before I wrote. Any school on this page can have the same space, on the same terms.

Martin Lippo, in a white chef's jacket with his name embroidered on it, leaning over a steel bench and pouring from a blue-gloved hand into a small container while thick white vapour from liquid nitrogen rolls off the surface and spills toward the camera. — Liquid nitrogen, off the bench and over the edge. The technique first, the dish afterwards.

A studio portrait of Martin Lippo against a plain pale background, in a white chef's jacket embroidered “Martin Lippo” with the Vakuum badge on the sleeve, one hand raised to his chin, looking straight at the camera. — Martin Lippo, who runs Vakuum and teaches it himself.

The Vakuum kitchen seen through a glass wall with the word Vakuum lettered across it in gold, the room behind full of stainless benches, mixers and rack shelving, with people working at the far side. — The lab behind its own glass. It is a working kitchen with a teaching room inside it, not a demonstration set.

A man in a white chef's jacket stands beside a paper flipchart marked with a diagram, a pen in his raised hand, talking to people seated at a bench in front of him who are writing in notebooks; shelves of labelled storage boxes fill the wall behind. — It starts on paper. The why comes before the nitrogen.

Cooks in white jackets and black kitchen dress sit in two rows at long steel benches with notebooks and water bottles in front of them, facing a man in a white jacket standing at the head of the room beneath a sign reading Vakuum. — Between the benches: the part that gets explained before it gets done.

A man in a white chef's jacket stands alone in a laboratory kitchen in front of a tall combi oven, one hand open mid-sentence; two people watch from the foreground with their backs to the camera. — Martin Lippo teaches in the lab himself. It is his own room.

Four cooks in white jackets stand shoulder to shoulder along a steel bench, leaning over trays, small bowls and a chopping board, each working with a hand tool; a man in glasses at the left watches the work. — Everybody works. Nobody is sitting down watching.

Several cooks in white jackets lean in close together over a steel bench; one in glasses works a small spoon into a metal cup beside a large glass jug of white liquid, a dark-haired woman watching from beside him and another man looking down at the work. — Four pairs of hands over one cup. This is what it looks like when something is being shown.

Four cooks in white jackets at a steel bench: one holds a red-capped squeeze bottle over a shallow glass tray, another lifts a small glass of dark liquid to taste, and a syringe and white bowl sit on the bench between them. — Spherification at the bench, with somebody tasting it the moment it is made.

A hand holds a clear plastic tub of bright yellow liquid in which five large translucent spheres sit, each skinned and holding its shape. — Five spheres in the bath, skinned on contact, thin enough to break on the tongue.

Photographs: Vakuum by Martin Lippo, sent by Martin Lippo, 30 Jul 2026. Used with permission; all rights remain theirs.

Visit Vakuum by Martin Lippo ↗

Facts read on the school's own pages, 17 Sep 2026.

The credential that counts here

A course certificate from a school you can book — or the long way round, a completed stage in a kitchen of this lineage. · Certifying body: No formal body. A school certifies its own course; a stage certifies nothing but the name on the door.

That is the one an outside body sets and marks, which is what separates it from a certificate a school prints itself — that proves you attended. We name which of the two a course actually gives you; ask the school the same question before you pay, and judge the answer yourself.

Why you can trust this map

How a place gets on here, and what we do when it stops being true

There is a real difference between a school that teaches you and a good-looking website, and too much of the internet is the second kind. Four instruments do the work, and every one of them is visible on the page you are already on.

We grade it in public, and publish what is missing. The Measure is five plain questions, not a score: is there a teacher we can name, can a stranger get in, will you be learning beside other people, is the craft alive in the place, and is there enough there to keep you going for years. An empty dot tells you which one we could not answer and why. A craft nobody has graded shows no meter at all, because an absence is not a zero.
We print what we checked and did NOT list. Every swept craft carries the places we looked at and turned down, each with its reason. That list is the part no marketplace prints, because a rejection is where the money is.
The claims are read back to their sources every night. A robot re-reads every link we publish against the school's own page each night, and every price and course name we have written a test for. page. When one stops matching three nights running, it is flagged for a human — and an entry that cannot be confirmed comes off. It is never softened.
Where we are not neutral, we say so above the recommendation. We run one paid week a year, with one teacher. His entry says that before it says anything good about him, and prints the way to reach him without us, at his prices.
Nothing here has been stood in yet. An open sheet means desk research, carefully done. No place on this map has been visited and dated by us. When one is, the check will carry a name and a date — and until then, the grade says so in the dots it leaves empty.
Nobody pays to be here, and nobody can pay to be left off. No commission, no listing fee, no tourist board. The order is the strength of the community, never the size of the wallet.

Before you trust any school — mine or anyone else's — ask these five things

Who actually teaches it? Can you find them by name, with a track record you can check yourself?
Is the craft alive in that place, or is the school the only thing there? A real scene has more than one good option.
What exactly do you walk away with — a recognised qualification, or a certificate they printed themselves? Ask which.
Can you speak to someone who did the course? A real person, not a testimonial on their own page.
What happens on a bad day — weather, an injury, a teacher who doesn't show? A serious place has an honest answer.

If a place dodges these, that's your answer. It costs you nothing to ask, and it tells you everything.

This is the short version. The full method is here — the six questions, in order, for any craft anywhere.

Barcelona, Spain

Schools in Barcelona

Vakuum by Martin Lippo

The credential that counts here

Also for Modernist Spanish Cuisine

How a place gets on here, and what we do when it stops being true