A Moveable Feast (12 page)

Matt Preston is a food journalist, restaurant critic and television personality, best known as a judge on
MasterChef Australia
. Matt’s food column appears in newspapers across Australia, and he writes for
Vogue Entertaining + Travel
and
delicious
. Matt has won several Food Media Club of Australia awards for his articles, and in 2008 he won the Food Journalist of the Year Award at the Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards. Previous positions include five years as the National Chief Judge for Restaurant and Catering’s National Awards for Excellence. Matt was the Creative Director of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival for five years from 2005 to 2009.

I have wanted to eat at El Bulli ever since I started writing about food and restaurants, ten years ago. So much so that when I was offered the role of a
MasterChef
mentor judge on the same day as my booking at El Bulli was confirmed, it was the table for four that I rang friends and colleagues to boast about. It is one of the great contemporary culinary legends that in the three days in
October that El Bulli accepts bookings, it receives more than a million emails chasing just 8000 seats for dinner. Getting a table here is harder than any other restaurant in the world, and prized accordingly.

El Bulli dominates the top position in most lists of the world’s best restaurants, and has held top spot in
Restaurant
magazine’s influential list (compiled from the votes of hundreds of leading foodies, critics and chefs) for the last four years, beginning in 2006.

Even in the strangely self-obsessed world of top chefs, this ranking is seldom railed against by chef Ferran Adrià’s peers, a tacit agreement that he is that rare thing – a culinary maestro who has inspired a paradigm shift in fine dining, a sort of Mozart of the kitchen. Of the other establishments in the
Restaurant
top five, two are run by disciples who cite time cooking at El Bulli as the ignition for their careers and ideas, and the other two share Adrià’s principles of innovation: using food as an invocation of memory to create a connection between chef and diner at a far deeper and more fundamental level than mere nourishment. The woman I love snorts at this as pretension and good marketing, but I liken it to when we eat our grandmother’s food: suddenly we taste not just the ingredients but our history, our heritage, our relationship with her, and everything that happened every other time we ate it. This analogy only lessens the wifely eye-rolling a little.

Ferran Adrià’s cooking is built around the chef’s desire to present familiar flavours in new and unfamiliar ways. To achieve this, the restaurant is shut for the months of the European winter while Adrià retires to his workshop-cum-laboratory to imagine new ideas and techniques to achieve a menu that alters radically each season. The question underlying my pilgrimage is whether the result of this process is actually dinner or just culinary high-wire antics aimed at impressing through their very newness and innovation. Or to put it another way: is El Bulli yummy?

I’m about to find out.

Adrià’s restaurant is a nondescript three-hour drive east along the coast from Barcelona. There is a strange ‘butterflies in hobnail boots’ sense of anticipation clattering round my gut as we drive into Roses, the seaside town closest to El Bulli. Roses is a most unlikely neighbour for the world’s most out-there restaurant. The crescent of coarse yellow sand is crusted with layer upon layer of fading five-storey family hotels, and the beach is packed with kiddies, solid-calved old ladies paddling in black and elderly blokes preening in budgie smugglers. It all looks like a scene from one of those lurid Technicolor travelogues of some long-lost era. The esplanade is lined with cheap cafés that smell of frying and stale beer.

Our hotel is pure Roses too – a one-star at the wrong end of the beach with matchstick furniture and faded prints of fishing boats. It is the only place in town with rooms left, though. Note to self: next time you get a booking at El Bulli in December, book the hotel right then too!

It is seven hours before dinner, so we potter on the beach, try to siesta, and generally mope around until it’s time to get ready. I suppose this is how football players must feel before a Grand Final. As our appointed hour approaches, my wife and I sit in the rickety hotel bar waiting for my friend and
Sydney Good Food Guide
editor Joanna Saville and her sister to arrive. I’m nervous like before a first date – and appropriately a pimple pops up on my forehead.

After a search for spot cream – how do you say ‘Clearasil’ in Catalan? – and a check for aftershave levels, the four of us cram into a little local taxi to wend twenty minutes up and away over the headlands towards a far sleepier tourist cove that was once best known as a scuba-diving location. There, clinging to one
side, is the low-rise adobe home that houses El Bulli. That busy but goat-track-narrow road of precipitous drops and views over a shimmering crystalline Mediterranean helps distance the tat of Roses, building the anticipation with every hairpin turn. It was to this coast that Dalí fled the world and it’s fitting that it now provides a home to a chef with a similarly twisted bent to his thoroughly modern mien.

A strange thrill shimmers across all of us as we turn into the drive past a long scree of artfully piled stones, but the welcome overwhelms any initial trepidation. When I met Adrià in Australia at the culmination of his world book tour, he was tired and quite distracted. Here he is animated and relaxed, and his tanned face wrinkles into a smile as we walk into his kitchen. In white chef’s jacket, apron and blue jeans, he is nuggetty.

We stand in front of the giant bronze bull’s head that has fooled some – yes, that’s my hand sneaking up embarrassedly – into thinking that the restaurant is named after it rather than the previous owner’s obsession with bulldogs. Adrià demands pictures. He crosses his arms over his belly and laughs as I do the same. ‘It’s a good way to hide the stomach,’ he observes in a mix of Catalan and pigeon English.

His modern kitchen, with the sleek lines of an art gallery, is filled with an army of forty-five young chefs. Adrià’s fame and Spain’s culinary training regime, which includes mandatory work experience, means the place is full of chefs earning little more than knowledge and the honour of working in the best restaurant in the world. This system of apprenticeship allows top Spanish restaurants like El Bulli to run ratios of chefs to customers that bubble around one to one.

A meal at El Bulli starts with snacks on the small terrace that overlooks the rough bay of Cala Montjoi and the path that leads around it. Every so often families in bikinis, boardies and sarongs traipse past on their way back from the beach and look in. This
parade, plus the wood-beamed, country pub-style dining rooms full of bulldog figurines and what could pass as the dodgiest paintings from a Rotary Art Show, makes El Bulli seem like a surprisingly un-elitist spot. It is a world away from the gilt, snootiness and champagne-chariots of many French three-star places.

‘Snacks’ is such a prosaic term for the creations that arrive: glassy wafers flavoured with vanilla or sweet tart pineapple studded with unlikely success by the salt-bitter contrast of black olive pieces. Then there are crazy salty candy shells that crack sweetly and send shivers down the spine as a filling of intense buttery liquid peanut splashes across my palate. After these faux peanuts, more oral fireworks come with Adrià’s famous olives. These virtual olives are prima facie evidence of his love of deconstructing food to re-engineer the flavour in different ways. Here a smooth pliable dusky-green jelly-skin holds the olive-flavoured juice. I bite and it explodes, splattering intense olive liquor across my mouth.

We drink a bottle of elite Kripta cava, Spanish wine made in the champagne manner. It is so fine – elusive and bright at first, more mellow and toasty as it sits in the glass – that it could make a Reims widow nervous, and we ‘snack-on’. Odd delicate crackers of Japanese intent; sticks of sugar cane soaked with the flavours of mojito and caipirinha cocktails that you suck; fat half cherries coated in the flavour of salty sour Japanese plum. These ooze a combination of cherry juice and plum wine, so much so that after my second one it looks like I’ve been hit with a spray of bullets – spreading bright red splotches across my cream jacket.

It’s a disaster spotted across the terrace by maître d’ Luis Garcia. When a similar thing happened at a very glitzy three-star in Paris – yes, it’s amazing that I ever put on weight, judging by how little food actually makes it to my mouth – a flock of waiters in tails descended and fussed over me in that ‘look at the
gauche Australian’ sort of way that they must be taught in waiter school, probably on the same day they learn ‘putting down Americans the de Gaulle way’. At El Bulli, however, Garcia sidles up and diffuses any embarrassment with a matter of fact demand for the jacket. This response breaks any remaining tension at being here.

Now we move into one of the two beamed dining rooms for the dinner proper. Thanks to the absence of music, the atmosphere is akin to a library reading room. The only sounds are people going, ‘Mmmmmmm,’ people going, ‘Hmmmmmm?’ and waiters issuing instructions on how each course should be approached. For each one of the ensuing edible tableaux comes with terse bullet points on how to eat it, perhaps as an insurance against diners breaking teeth on the fluid-lined sculptures that act as plates here: ‘Eat this in one bite,’ ‘Suck the flower but don’t eat it,’ ‘Eat this leaf,’ ‘Two bites but don’t eat the leaf.’

For chapter after chapter, this epic goes on with the sort of breathless enthusiasm of a small child showing off all his new Christmas presents. It’s a relentless assault. As the meal progresses, Adrià’s current culinary obsession with Japan, with the soy bean, sesame seeds and pine, become increasingly clear. There’s a plate containing over a dozen different expressions of the soy bean, from sprouts and slimy fermented Japanese
natto
to miso, soy and what tastes like milky beancurd skin. While young pine needles come candied, pine milk is partnered with gin in a cocktail, and we reacquaint ourselves with pine nuts in little gel packets that we dip in a sort of sweet pine resin tea and then pop into our mouths. The packets dissolve on the tongue to deliver a pine nut praline, a pine nut butter and a pine nut oil. Wow!

These obsessions make for a slightly unbalanced meal. Some dishes are wonderful, bursting with flavour and turning my tongue inside out with unexpected textures and combinations,
like the little parmesan gel ravioli with coffee grains, a fat scampi that’s raw at one end and golden-fried at the other, and a plate of ‘mimetic almonds’: here a wedge of black-olive-dusted apricot sits amongst young green almond kernels, toasted almonds and various other similarly shaped ‘expressions of almondiness’ with different textures such as the almond jellies, and even what the waiter confirms are the occasional apricot kernels.

Other jaw-dropping moments revolve as much around the produce sourced as the techniques. A strange raw little leaf, Dutch-grown and dotted with dew drops of vinegar, tastes uncannily like oysters; petals from a rose imported from Ecuador fool us into thinking they are artichoke leaves, thanks to an artichoke vinaigrette. ‘Here, nothing is as it seems,’ says the waiter, who clears the plates as if quoting an El Bulli motto.

More perplexing is a giant hollow egg of frozen coconut cream where the sweet shell is eaten sprinkled with curry powder. It’s one of many examples of how Adrià likes people to eat with their fingers rather than cutlery; it’s also an example of how modern Spanish restaurants, like the French, struggle with the use of unfamiliar spices. The curry powder has a raw spice taste.

Overall, the menu of thirty-nine courses, or tastes, starts sweet and ends exploring iodine-like flavours in dishes such as almost-raw tasting sliced kidney and a mix of green tea, caviar and rather wibbly-wobbly heat-wilted tendrils of sea anemones that look like some phaser-blasted alien from
Star Trek.
These are interesting maybe, but both are distinctly un-yummy. And they are not alone. There are other dishes that don’t ring any bells for our party, like raw cockles with fennel and the flavour of Japanese citrus yuzu, slabs of cooked
jamón
fat with abalone, poppy and little sprigs of what we take to be seaweed, and that plate of soy which seems far less exotic when viewed from an Australian rather than Spanish perspective.

This is El Bulli’s first season after the departure of Ferran’s brother and muse, Albert, from the long-held role of pastry chef. Compared to the rest of the menu, for me the desserts lack the lunacy, cohesion and same breathless over-excitement. The most spectacular-looking dessert – called ‘roots’ because it resembles bonsai-sized tree roots in soil – is a jumble of chocolate and yuzu that never quite gels for me.

As we come to the end of our meal, I pause and reflect: was my pilgrimage worth the wait – and the effort?

El Bulli, it seems to me, is like the culinary equivalent of the Paris catwalks, with a new collection of dishes each year. While you might appreciate the cutting-edge nature of what you see, nothing is going to be turning up on your high street any time soon. For example, three years after their debut at El Bulli it is only now that Adrià inventions like foam-gun-aerated sponge have started creeping onto Aussie fine-dining menus.