From SBS Food
As he hits Australia to promote his new book A Day at El Bulli, Ed Charles catches up with the man who is changing the way we relate to food.
There is no easy way to explain the food of Ferran Adria at El Bulli, which has been unanimously voted, for the past three years, as the best restaurant in the world. You need to eat there and that’s difficult because his 50 seat restaurant, a two hour drive north of Barcelona in Spain, only takes 8,000 people a year and two million apply for places.
Most of us simply won’t make it there.
But we can find the influence of what Adria calls avant-garde, high-end cuisine influence in plenty of restaurants around the world and, in Australia.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many restaurants now offer dozens of courses in degustation, it is Adria’s influence. If you’ve ever wondered why plates aren’t simply round anymore but square, oblong, wavy or made out of exotic metals it is because Adria did it first. If you wonder why chefs are serving ingredients foraged from the seashore – or magical spices from Africa, that you’ve never heard of – it is because he started searching for new ingredients and combinations.
It was Adria who first used seaweed extracts to make flavoured, wispy foams, or synthesized spheres of flavour – for instance olive oil balls that taste of the pure essence of olive that look like olives themselves. He started cooking – or freezing really – in liquid nitrogen at -196°C. He started deconstructing dishes and presenting food as works of art. For instance, olive oil spun into thread and wrapped into a glimmering coil that melts in the mouth.
Many people mix up the words to describe what he does, dubbing it molecular cooking, meaning that hard core science is involved. But Adria, speaking in Catalan through a translator, says that for 90 per cent of the dishes he creates he doesn’t need scientists.
And to a certain extent his world tour to launch his 632–page book A day at El Bulli is a mission to set the record straight on his methods.
It’s not molecular gastronomy. That’s just the study of the science behind cooking. It’s not molecular cuisine, a term that Adria says means nothing but is often used by the media.
“First we should point out that there is molecular gastronomy and molecular cuisine,” Adria says. “It is evident that molecular gastronomy exists and it has been around for a long time and it never has had a connection to high end cuisine. On the other hand molecular cuisine doesn’t exist.”
He even has problems with a new term, tecno-emotional, coined recently by Spanish journalist Pau Arenós who set out a ten point manifesto for this new type of cuisine.
On stage and in the book Adria says: “creativity is not copying”. What he is interested in is the food and making diners happy rather than business. That is the course he decided to follow in 1994, ten years after he joined El Bulli. It was then he broke out of the mould of traditional French haute cuisine, established by great chefs such as Auguste Escoffier and Antoine Carême before him.
For much of the next ten years Adria built a formidable reputation in Spain, and among his peers around the world. He started closing the restaurant for the six months over the winter season, developing new ideas, presentations of food, implements and cooking devices in his Barcelona-based laboratory.
By 2004 he was on the front covers of influential magazines in the US and more chefs started copying his cuisine. Since then there have been three restaurants in Melbourne working with Adria’s style of cuisine and all have closed. George Calombaris’s restaurant Reserve closed in 2005 while Raymond Capaldi’s Fenix and Robin Wickens’ Interlude both closed this year.
Ferran Adria’s work is labour intensive. He says that in western developed countries it won’t be economic to develop avant-garde, high-end cuisine. The manpower required is enormous. Adria has 70 people working in his restaurant to serve just 50 people each night. In developing countries ingredients and manpower are cheaper.
Adria tells me he’s never made a profit then admits that maybe some years he has. But overall El Bulli is not a profitable enterprise, he says.
It is supported by myriad spin-off businesses and consultancies from fast food to hotels, 90 per cent of which are to be sold. El Bulli will be kept going with the help of a foundation.
Interestingly, Adria isn’t the only chef to have trouble making money from this type of food. Heston Blumenthal, whose restaurant The Fat Duck in Bray, outside London, has been the number two restaurant in the world for the past three years, almost went bust in 2004 just before it was awarded three prize stars from the Michelin restaurant guide.
Molecular restaurants maybe off the menu in Australia. But Adria’s influence lives on, you can be sure of that.
A day at El Bulli
Phaidon Press $75