“36 Hours,” a television program inspired by The Times’s 36 Hours column, airs Mondays at 8 p.m. Eastern on Travel Channel. The next episode on Barcelona dovetails with our column from last year.

Andrew Ferren, a New York Times contributor based in Madrid, discusses “hidden” Barcelona.

Q. In an outtake on Travel Channel’s Barcelona “36 Hours” episode, you and the hosts of the show climb a stairway and walk through a door and into a charming bar called Mutis. How did you discover that place?

A. The door policy at Mutis may have loosened up a bit over the years, but they did require identity verification (see the fingerprint scanner to the right of the entrance). I was lucky enough to get inside solely because I dine frequently at Bar Mut, the superb restaurant that spawned Mutis. Dining there alone one night, the owner and I started chatting. Later he walked me upstairs and deposited me at the bar of his new project, Mutis, saying he’d be right back. He returned in a sort of tailcoat with streaks of makeup on his face like Adam Ant. Soon the place filled up with like-minded revelers. It was a Monday night and the vibe was certainly more free-spirited and festive than just sitting in a bar. It was all the more striking given its location in the poshest part of the Eixample rather than down some alley in the Raval.

Are there many such off-the-radar spots in Barcelona?

There are all sorts of secret spots in the city — galleries, designer ateliers, spas, hair salons and certainly bars and restaurants. Catalans are renowned merchants willing to welcome the world (and recently it can feel like the whole world) to their capital. But as residents they also like a whiff of novelty and exclusivity for themselves. And like the Italians and French with whom they share some cultural and linguistic roots, Catalans love to do things properly — they might even say perfectly. Whether constructing a cathedral or baking a croissant, there is an inherent embrace of quality, design and craftsmanship for the task at hand. Put those together and you get Barcelona’s peculiar commercial “underbelly,” albeit a very toned and buffed one. Over the years I’ve been lucky to have local friends show me their favorite spots. As a writer it can be challenging to describe what I find as I often run out of synonyms: you can’t really call the cocktails at Mutis “drinks.”