Drink like one reads Foster Wallace

For a cocktail bar to present itself as "postmodern" sounds like a calculated provocation, but Kyara turns that label into its flag. At the bar of Alex Kratena and Monica Berg, which takes its name from the most precious agarwood, drinks are built from aromatic accords. The result is a space that looks like a laboratory: a Martini diagnosed as if it were a medical consultation, urban music in the background, and the air of a 007 villain's lair.

The marketing definition fits: fragments, pastiche, cross-references, undisguised artifice. But the more I think about Kyara—and what it symbolizes—the more I wonder if we haven't already moved on to the next screen. It seems that bars like this (and gastronomy in general) have left behind the irony of postmodernism to enter that ambiguous territory that theorists call metamodernism: a space where parody coexists with a strange sincerity, as if we laughed at the artifice and at the same time believed in it.

The history of gastronomy, in fact, has followed a surprisingly similar path to that of literature. The nouvelle cuisine was our modern novel against haute cuisine: chefs who broke with royal tradition with the same irreverence with which Cervantes got rid of chivalric romances. Then Ferran Adrià appeared, our Foster Wallace of the stoves, who turned the menu into a philosophical text, full of quotes, games, and intertextuality.

And now it is by no means casual that many new Catalan restaurants are revisiting old recipes—Franca, Fontané, Absis, Vinum (Mas d'en Buno) or La Sosenga—as if they wanted to recover history but reinterpreted with today's rules. It is a gesture very similar to what the postmodern Coetzee does in Foe, rewriting Robinson Crusoe to give it another layer of meaning.

In the same way, chefs like the Danish Rasmus Munk, who at Alchemist prints the diner's face on a plate so that they end up eating themselves, or Andoni Luis Aduriz, who invites you to peel the skin off a face served at the table, turn parody into ritual. It is a movement in the purest Ben Marcus style: a game that would make a postmodern smile, but which a metamodern would defend with all the seriousness in the world.

Along the same lines, Kyara's role, which activates three of the great coordinates of metamodernism, is better understood. Historicity, because it revisits classics like the Martini from a contemporary perspective; affect, because despite the laboratory aesthetic, there is an unexpected intimacy in a sip that appeals to olfactory memory; and depth, because the experience unfolds in artistic collaborations, experiments with artificial intelligence, and a soundtrack conceived as part of the narrative.

That's why this Barcelona bar is the perfect excuse to think that gastronomy, like literature, is opening a new chapter. The artifice is still there, but it's no longer enough to just see it: now we want to be moved by it. And this is where the venue shows all its strength, because it transforms the collage of signs of the present into affection, memory, and a bit of truth. After all, are we drinking a cocktail... or savoring the prologue of a new cultural era?