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Meet Chef Ferran Adrià, the controversial, culinary genius behind El Bulli, the world's most overbooked restaurant.
Most gourmets would eat their right hand for an opportunity to dine at El Bulli. So what's all the fuss about, you ask? Get the inside scoop from the restaurant's controversial culinary genius, chef Ferran Adrià.
"For me, cooking is a way to see life, of understanding it. It is a passion."
Ferran Adrià
The facts have by now become legendary: El Bulli, the Michelin three-star restaurant located in a remote coastal village at the end of a long, windy road some three hours north of Barcelona, opens only 6 months a year, takes reservations for only one day in January, and becomes fully-booked within hours of the phone lines opening. It doesn't help that the restaurant's Catalan chef, Ferran Adrià, has been variously described as "the best cook on the planet," "the world's greatest chef," and other breathless superlatives. Permit us to add another: El Bulli is the world's most difficult restaurant to get into. Most gourmets would eat their right hand for an opportunity to dine there...
So what's with the hype you ask? To begin, the cuisine at El Bulli goes far beyond the basic criteria of excellent food and fresh, seasonal ingredients. A meal here is an otherworldly culinary experience. Adrià's "avant-garde" cooking, as he himself describes it, is an astonishing play of taste, texture, and temperature. Take the pea soup, for example: consumed in one shot, the soup's texture and color remain constant but the temperature drops, starting hot and finishing cold, the flavor changing along with the temperature. This is not an amuse-bouche. It's an education for the palate.
"I like to provoke well-being and happiness. I enjoy making the kinds of dishes that surprise and that leave the most excellent memories," said Adrià. "It's the most magical dishes that leave the longest impression in the memory."
Even if you're not lucky enough to taste Adrià's cooking, a glance through his 'degustation menu'—composed of nearly 30 individual gourmet sensations—can leave an unforgettable impression: pistachios covered in yoghurt, caramel, curry, peanut and chocolate; a popcorn piece that disintegrates in the mouth; a parmesan and lemon crunchy asteroid ball; barnacles with tea foam; a tomato sorbet served with a bread puff that explodes in the mouth with a lava of perfumed, warm olive oil; parmesan ice cream sandwich; trout egg tempura; an apple jelly lozenge injected with juniper and sherry vinegar; sea urchin ravioli served with sea urchin jelly, pineapple and mango jelly with a fennel jus and a foam made from aromatic herbs; almond ice cream with garlic and balsamic; and get this: consommé with tamarind and freeze-dried, shaved foie gras! And on and on and on. One can almost imagine the privileged diners levitating from their sought-after seats...
"We have to engage emotion, sensibilities, and analytic powers," said Adrià. "We must engage sight, so that people can 'read' a dish; smell; temperature contrast; texture (asparagus has over 300 textures); tastes, of course; palatal sensations such as astringency; harmony..."
Adrià's cooking may leave you speechless, but there's a term to describe what he does: 'molecular gastronomy,' a branch of food science that focuses on the physics of cooking and food preparation (as opposed to the chemical composition of food.) And as befits his mad scientist concoctions, Adrià has a laboratory. Located in Barcelona, it's where he spends the other 6 months of the year, experimenting with ingredients and preparation methods, using such tools as liquid nitrogen, pH meters, refractometers and blowtorches.
"The creative process itself is very cold. Taste has nothing to do with it; it doesn't intervene at all. Where tastes and sensitivity start to come into play is when we actually put the dishes together. It's a very complicated process. For instance, the combination of bone marrow and caviar, in principle, is impossible. You can't get your head around it. Two kinds of fat; sea and mountains. There's a new technique there, treating the bone marrow as if it were foie gras."
Right, now you begin to see what the fuss is all about. Now, the million dollar question is: short of leaping to the phone next January just to spend the day pushing redial, what else can you do to experience El Bulli's extraterrestrial cooking?
Here's a secret that not many people know about. El Bulli operates a luxury hotel, a stunning manor house located on a hillside above the agrarian hamlet of Sanlucar la Mayor, 12 miles south of Seville. Surrounded by acres of olive groves and farmland, the Hacienda Benazuza began life in the 10th century. Having survived centuries of cultural, religious and architectural upheavals, the historic and legendary building today retains its Andalusian and Moorish trappings, while witnessing another revolution—in the kitchen: the restaurants here are also run by Ferran Adrià. While the great chef is rarely on the premises, his recipes, cooking styles and culinary philosophy are upheld with exacting precision.
"The cooking here is exactly the same as what you would find at the El Bulli restaurant. Nothing is different," Adrià assured us. "Come with the spirit of letting yourself be transported."
Intrepid gourmets will soon be able to try their hand at Adrià's commanding cuisine with his new cookbook, El Bulli 2005. Released in Spanish this month, the 500-page heavyweight limited-edition box set includes a detailed user's guide and interactive CD ROM with cooking demonstrations. Watch this space for more on the mega-tome upon its international release.