The restaurant elBulli has been getting a lot of attention lately. As it rightfully should. The avant-garde eatery, located about 100 miles north of Barcelona on the Costa Brava, is helmed by culinary madman/wizard/god Ferran Adria. The restaurant has been lauded the universe over for its menu of edible lunacy, its physics-defying dishes that include once-solid ingredients turned to foams and jellies and flavored oxygen. The place is so woww-ing, there's even been a backlash to the hagiographical-like reports filed by food journalists who can't seem to contain their post-elBulli enthusiasm. The restaurant gets a reported million reservations requests every year. It fills only 8,000 of those. But all this doesn't matter anymore because, as you've undoubtedly heard, elBulli is closing for good (the space will re-open in 2014 as some kind of culinary think tank).

And so, let's say you're in Barcelona (as I was last week) and let's say you love to eat (as I do) and you're not cool enough to know the right kind of people who can pull strings and get you into elBulli (as I'm not), and certainly not cool enough to get invited there and arrive by helicopter (as my friend Adam Sachs recently did). What's a food-loving traveler in Barcelona to do? You could go to one of the two new restaurants that Ferran and his brother Albert have recently opened in Barcelona, Tickets and 41 Degrees? But even those are a hot---pardon the pun---ticket these days.

Many chefs who have logged time in the elBulli kitchen have eventually struck out on their own, some of whom have opened up their own places in Barcelona (you can read about the future great chefs of the world who have logged time in elBulli's kitchen in Lisa Abend's great new book, by the way). And so here's an idea: if you can't get Ferran Adria to cook for you, do the next best thing. Have the chefs he trained cook for you. You'll spend a lot less money too. Here is my subjective list of where to eat in Barcelona when you can't get into elBulli.