Xemei

Venetian line at the Barcelona pass

Fresh pasta and seafood set the register for Max Colombo, chef and co-founder at Xemei in Barcelona, where the pass holds to Venice rather than a softened idea of Italy. Colombo was born in Venice, and since 2007 he has worked at this Poble Sec restaurant with a cuisine that keeps its source visible: spaghetti al nero di sepia, bigoi with Venetian sauce, cacio e pepe, tiramisu. The dishes read plainly because the discipline is plain. Pasta carries sauce; seafood carries its own salinity; the kitchen does not need to translate the Adriatic into spectacle for a Barcelona room.

His role here is not a visiting signature laid over someone else’s station. Colombo is co-chef and co-founder, which ties him to the origin of the restaurant as well as the daily work of keeping it coherent. His Barcelona life later widened to include Can Cisa - Bar Brutal, where he has been chef since 2013, but Xemei remains the address where his Venetian cooking was set down first. The continuity matters. A cuisine carried from one city to another can become either memory or method; at Xemei, Colombo treats it as method, returned to service after service.

Pasta, black ink, Venetian sauce

The menu’s clearest grammar sits in the named dishes. Spaghetti al nero di sepia asks the kitchen to let cuttlefish ink lead without roughening the plate into novelty. Bigoi with Venetian sauce holds to a regional line, a shape of pasta and sauce that depends on restraint more than abundance. Cacio e pepe sits beside them as a Roman form, direct and unforgiving when the emulsion fails. Tiramisu closes the register without changing the pace.

Xemei’s approach is traditional, and the cooking is not arranged around reinvention. Seafood gives the kitchen its second axis, alongside pasta, and local sourcing keeps the work embedded in Barcelona even as the flavor memory points back across the water. The wine program is curated with a natural-wine focus, a structure that suits a room where the food depends on acidity, salt, bitterness and the soft pressure of fermentation rather than polish for its own sake.

A small room with the counter close

The room in Poble Sec works at close range. Xemei is small, relaxed and cozy, with huge windows and a laid-back bohemian feel, the kind of setting where the counter and the pass never feel far from the table. Conversation stays part of the texture. The atmosphere does not ask diners to lower their voices into ceremony, and the cooking does not require that kind of distance.

That closeness suits Colombo’s work. Venetian seafood and fresh pasta reward attention at the moment they arrive, before heat drops out of the sauce or ink loses its gloss against the spaghetti. In a more formal room, the same dishes could stiffen. Here, they keep their movement. The place has 2 current awards, but the more concrete measure is still the plate in front of the window: bigoi with Venetian sauce at Xemei.