 "Feeding the hungry mind")
Ferran Adrià, the Spanish chef who turned foods into foams and pioneered a new era in gastronomic innovation while running one of the world's most popular restaurants, has always been inquisitive. Even during the peak years at El Bulli, when Restaurant Magazine named it the world's best restaurant five times from 2002 to 2009 and he rocketed beyond the standard-fare celebrity chefs into the rarefied air of the gastronomic geniuses, he would pose random questions about the origin of vegetables or fruit.
Creativity made El Bulli and, later, killed it. Adrià, 52, calculated that he concocted 1,846 dishes during his time there, many of which pushed the boundaries on epicurean labels (the artichoke as rose petals, the olive formed from frozen olive juice). He says the primary reason he closed the restaurant in 2011 was not a family squabble or overwhelming money troubles. It was that even while El Bulli operated only six months a year and served just one meal a day, Adrià - whose entire brand was built on deconstructing everything that people thought they knew about food - was scared of repeating himself.
Now there is pressure of a different kind. Adrià's acclaim came with benefits that were tangible - he used to charge euro 80,000 for an hour-long lecture on creativity. His latest venture is an umbrella project known as the El Bulli Foundation. Like any number of celebrities before him, Adrià has taken advantage of his reputation and fame to vault into a new endeavour. There is little food at his headquarters now. There are no bags of flour or sugar or grain lying around, only questions and more questions, diagrams and notecards. If all of this seems a bit academic, consider that Adrià likes to say, "Now, we will eat knowledge."
So what is his goal? The foundation's current mission seems to flutter between worldly and chaotic. Consider the activity on a morning in November: One group of employees worked in a corner of the loft on prototypes of a website known as BulliPedia that, when finished, will be a type of Wikipedia for haute cuisine. Adrià is now shouldering the expectations of a company that has invested in him, a nation that (mostly) adores him and a global culinary community that reveres him.
About two hours north of Barcelona, there is a protected area, Parc Natural del Cap de Creus, that juts into a bay. The park is famous for inspiring the work of Salvador Dalí and, later, as the unlikely location of El Bulli. For years, expectant diners made their way along a narrow road toward the bay and through the narrow doorway with the familiar bulldog logo etched into the wall, settling into seats for what was, essentially, an art show presented on a shimmering dinner-plate canvas.
At present, the tiny house is covered in demolition dust, and has been transformed into a makeshift office holding reams of paper detailing the reconstruction of what Adrià envisioned as the heartbeat of the El Bulli Foundation. The proposed name of this museum is El Bulli 1846 - named for the number of dishes the restaurant produced - and the design is airy and grand. There is only one problem: It is mostly not happening. When Adrià's vision was revealed, ecologists almost immediately objected to the potential impact of the expansion within the park and gathered nearly 96,000 signatures on a petition to stifle it.
Santi Vila, the minister for territory and sustainability in the region, which is expected to vote on whether to grant Adrià an exemption from the law limiting expansion in natural parks, says he does not believe that Adrià should be apprehensive. "This is very important - Ferran Adrià and FC Barcelona are the two biggest brands in Catalonia," Vila says, referring to the popular soccer team.
Just after 6 pm, as the light coming through the loft's windows is fading, Adrià sits still for just a few moments at a table alongside one wall. These moments are rare. "I don't like to unplug," he explains. "There is always too much to do."
He often mentions how he enjoys working 18 hours a day, and he reveals that he rarely eats. Despite his lack of interest in operating a restaurant again, Adrià's passion for cooking has not waned. He still watches cooking shows on television, enjoying MasterChef and Top Chef the most, and is involved with the restaurants run by his brother, Albert.
At home, Adrià cooks simple dishes, such as fish with vegetables, but, for just a moment, he allowed himself to recall the wonder he felt when he deconstructed a dish for the first time. It was 1994, and he turned rice with a fried egg on top into "kind of a tomato, with ice cream," he says. Leaning back in a chair as he looks across the whole of the loft space, he smiles at the memory of a time when the process he made famous was so fresh and new.
A deconstruction of Adrià's goals suggests that his previously insatiable thirst for innovation has been replaced by an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The sunlight is gone, and the office is quiet. Adrià stops at one desk. He peers at a notebook. He lingers, finally, over a grid of index cards that traced the history of cuisine from the Neolithic era to the present day. Thousands of years, thousands of changes in cooking style, preparation, ingredients and techniques. Thousands of innovations. Adria frowned. "If I don't understand all of this," he says, "I don't understand anything."
Creativity made El Bulli and, later, killed it. Adrià, 52, calculated that he concocted 1,846 dishes during his time there, many of which pushed the boundaries on epicurean labels (the artichoke as rose petals, the olive formed from frozen olive juice). He says the primary reason he closed the restaurant in 2011 was not a family squabble or overwhelming money troubles. It was that even while El Bulli operated only six months a year and served just one meal a day, Adrià - whose entire brand was built on deconstructing everything that people thought they knew about food - was scared of repeating himself.
Now there is pressure of a different kind. Adrià's acclaim came with benefits that were tangible - he used to charge euro 80,000 for an hour-long lecture on creativity. His latest venture is an umbrella project known as the El Bulli Foundation. Like any number of celebrities before him, Adrià has taken advantage of his reputation and fame to vault into a new endeavour. There is little food at his headquarters now. There are no bags of flour or sugar or grain lying around, only questions and more questions, diagrams and notecards. If all of this seems a bit academic, consider that Adrià likes to say, "Now, we will eat knowledge."
So what is his goal? The foundation's current mission seems to flutter between worldly and chaotic. Consider the activity on a morning in November: One group of employees worked in a corner of the loft on prototypes of a website known as BulliPedia that, when finished, will be a type of Wikipedia for haute cuisine. Adrià is now shouldering the expectations of a company that has invested in him, a nation that (mostly) adores him and a global culinary community that reveres him.
About two hours north of Barcelona, there is a protected area, Parc Natural del Cap de Creus, that juts into a bay. The park is famous for inspiring the work of Salvador Dalí and, later, as the unlikely location of El Bulli. For years, expectant diners made their way along a narrow road toward the bay and through the narrow doorway with the familiar bulldog logo etched into the wall, settling into seats for what was, essentially, an art show presented on a shimmering dinner-plate canvas.
At present, the tiny house is covered in demolition dust, and has been transformed into a makeshift office holding reams of paper detailing the reconstruction of what Adrià envisioned as the heartbeat of the El Bulli Foundation. The proposed name of this museum is El Bulli 1846 - named for the number of dishes the restaurant produced - and the design is airy and grand. There is only one problem: It is mostly not happening. When Adrià's vision was revealed, ecologists almost immediately objected to the potential impact of the expansion within the park and gathered nearly 96,000 signatures on a petition to stifle it.
Santi Vila, the minister for territory and sustainability in the region, which is expected to vote on whether to grant Adrià an exemption from the law limiting expansion in natural parks, says he does not believe that Adrià should be apprehensive. "This is very important - Ferran Adrià and FC Barcelona are the two biggest brands in Catalonia," Vila says, referring to the popular soccer team.
Just after 6 pm, as the light coming through the loft's windows is fading, Adrià sits still for just a few moments at a table alongside one wall. These moments are rare. "I don't like to unplug," he explains. "There is always too much to do."
He often mentions how he enjoys working 18 hours a day, and he reveals that he rarely eats. Despite his lack of interest in operating a restaurant again, Adrià's passion for cooking has not waned. He still watches cooking shows on television, enjoying MasterChef and Top Chef the most, and is involved with the restaurants run by his brother, Albert.
At home, Adrià cooks simple dishes, such as fish with vegetables, but, for just a moment, he allowed himself to recall the wonder he felt when he deconstructed a dish for the first time. It was 1994, and he turned rice with a fried egg on top into "kind of a tomato, with ice cream," he says. Leaning back in a chair as he looks across the whole of the loft space, he smiles at the memory of a time when the process he made famous was so fresh and new.
A deconstruction of Adrià's goals suggests that his previously insatiable thirst for innovation has been replaced by an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The sunlight is gone, and the office is quiet. Adrià stops at one desk. He peers at a notebook. He lingers, finally, over a grid of index cards that traced the history of cuisine from the Neolithic era to the present day. Thousands of years, thousands of changes in cooking style, preparation, ingredients and techniques. Thousands of innovations. Adria frowned. "If I don't understand all of this," he says, "I don't understand anything."
©2015 The New York Times