The Juice (30 page)

When he finished his military service in 1984, Adrià returned to El Bulli and, when Vinay left to start his own restaurant, became the
chef de cuisine
. Adrià was joined by his younger brother the following year, and Albert would go on to become the pâtissier, responsible for most of the exotic and bizarre desserts that were an important part of the menu. Ironically, it was a traditional French chef who provided Adrià with his road-to-Damascus moment, his conversion to the avant-garde. In the early days El Bulli’s menu reflected French traditions as well as the innovations of nouvelle
cuisine, but in 1987 Adrià decided to try to invent his own style after listening to a lecture by the Chantecler chef Jacques Maximin. “Creativity means not copying,” Maximin had declared in answer to a question. “This simple sentence was what brought about a change in approach to our cooking,” Adrià wrote later, “and was the cut-off point between ‘re-creation’ and a firm decision to become involved in creativity.” That year he decided to close the restaurant for five months in the winter—a period later extended to six months—and devote the hiatus to experimentation. One early innovation, created with the help of a whipped-cream siphon, was the famous “foam”—essentially a superlight mousse—that has since become something of a gastronomic cliché, imitated from Toulouse to Topeka. Adrià’s first foam, made of white beans and served on a sea urchin, appeared in 1994. He even made a foam infused with wood smoke. At about this time he began his “deconstructions” of traditional recipes such as his “chicken curry”—chicken sauce over curry ice cream. This new cuisine would eventually be tagged with the label “molecular gastronomy,” a phrase Adrià is weary of, though he may never escape it. He prefers “avant-garde cuisine.”

El Bulli gained a third Michelin star in 1997, but perhaps even more significant was the declaration by Joël Robuchon the previous year that Ferran Adrià was the best cook on the planet. Widely regarded as the best chef in the world, Robuchon ostensibly retired in 1996 and identified Ferran Adrià as his “heir” in a French television interview. That the grand master of the French culinary tradition passed the baton to a Spaniard provoked howls of indignation in France. In fact,
l’affaire
Adrià was only one of many signs that classical French cooking had stagnated and that Spain now represented cuisine’s creative cutting edge, a perception that was endorsed by a 2003 cover story in
The New York Times Magazine
headlined “The Nueva Nouvelle Cuisine: How Spain Became the New France.” The Chicago chef Charlie Trotter was quoted in it as
saying, “Spain is where the zeitgeist has shifted.” At the center of this shift was Adrià. “Like Elvis or Miles,” wrote Arthur Lubow, the author of the piece, “he is usually known by his first name alone: Ferran.”

Adrià himself acknowledges that the
Times
article was seminal in the history of El Bulli. “It was the consolidation of our reputation,” he says. “The beginning of the myth.” In 2006,
Restaurant
magazine named it the World’s Best Restaurant, a title maintained for the next four years. Suddenly Adrià was an international celebrity, and every single gastronome wanted a seat at his table, along with countless heat seekers who didn’t know the difference between a puree and a foam. One can only imagine the frenzy of sharp elbows and conspicuous displays of entitlement that might have resulted if El Bulli had been located in New York, or even Barcelona, which is on everyone’s New Europe itinerary.

Like many before her, my wife couldn’t help wondering why El Bulli was located so far from civilization, a question Adrià answered in the course of a two-hour monologue without my even having to ask it. “We wanted to create a discourse with our diners, to create an experience,” he said, when we met him at the restaurant a few days after the commencement of its final season. We were sitting on the terrace, overlooking the beach at Cala Montjoi and the Mediterranean, the view framed by pines. I had just driven some twenty-five minutes over the still treacherous road—in fact passing an accident scene, where two police cars with flashing lights were perched at the edge of the road, a banged-up Audi at the bottom of the hillside fifty yards below. By all accounts the road was much improved since the early days. The rugged countryside was extraordinarily beautiful, the steep hillsides covered in olive trees and pines. “The road coming here, getting a reservation, it’s all part of the experience.” But more than that, he added, “this project would only be possible outside a city. For many years
almost nobody came, so we had time to grow and experiment. The environment, the peace and tranquillity here, make our work possible.”

The landscape may have been tranquil, but Adrià is anything but. For two hours he talked, answering my first question, waving his arms for emphasis, pausing only when our translator touched his arm to remind him that she needed to do her job, listening intently to her translation, and sometimes repeating a word or nodding in agreement. His plastic, wildly expressive face reminded me a lot of Jackie Gleason’s. I started with a simple question, the one that everyone was asking: Was El Bulli really closing for good?

“A lot of people talk about this, but no one really understands it,” he said. He admitted that even he was taken aback by the international hue and cry occasioned by his announcement at Madrid Fusión that he was closing the restaurant for two years. At the time, his vision of the future was somewhat inchoate, but in the intervening months his plans have become more concrete.

“If you look at the history of El Bulli, you will see that it’s exceptional. This is a logical stage of the evolution of the restaurant. In 1987 we decided to close for six months of the year.” In 1998 he founded the Taller, a kitchen/laboratory in Barcelona where the El Bulli team experimented and created new dishes in the off-season. “In 2001, when El Bulli was becoming very well-known, the logical thing would have been to stay open year-round. But for us the most important thing was creativity. So instead we decided to close for lunch, and the level of creativity kept getting higher. But at some point I realized we wouldn’t be able to continue to evolve as a restaurant.” In other words, in order to save El Bulli, he would have to close it to the public.

As El Bulli evolved and became more and more successful, it became less and less accessible. At each stage, pushing the boundaries of cuisine required a respite from the demands of running a
restaurant. Viewed from this perspective, closing the restaurant is the final stage in its creative evolution. The pressure of customers, the spectacular disparity between the supply of seats and the hordes of people who wanted them, seemed to have reached a kind of tipping point. Ferran’s a friendly and gregarious man who travels extensively in the off-season, and everyone he meets, sooner or later, will ask for a reservation for himself or a friend or a friend of a friend. And Ferran hates to say no, though he claims to have no problem turning away celebrities. “Only if it’s somebody I really admire,” he said. “I don’t really care about movie stars. I want this to be a democratic place.” For this reason he refused to charge what the market would bear; 250 euros a head isn’t cheap, but he could charge triple that and still fill the place ten times over. “It’s an affordable luxury.” But he realized the result wasn’t so much a democracy as a nepotocracy; chefs seemed to form no small part of the clientele, plus friends of friends. When I ran into a Williams classmate in the dining room, I asked how he’d gotten in, and he explained that his girlfriend worked in a museum whose director was a friend of Ferran’s.

In 2014, El Bulli will reopen under a different format, one that probably won’t accommodate paying customers. “It will be kind of a think tank,” Adrià said. “Not a school exactly, but a foundation. A private nonprofit foundation.” He still seemed to be improvising, refining the concept. “We’ll have twenty-five people here, chefs, two or three journalists, tech people. At the end of the day our work will be posted on the Internet. We will collaborate with the world of art and design. It will not be a restaurant. No Michelin, no customers, no pressure. Every year will be different.”

“There aren’t enough professionals dedicated to analysis and research,” he said, drumming the table in front of us. “This is work that people are doing at universities. Cuisine is entering a new phase. There will be cooking at Harvard.” I would have scoffed at
this notion if I hadn’t already read that Adrià was going to teach at Harvard that fall, presiding over a course called Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter. The course would bring together Harvard science profs and top chefs like Adrià, his friend Jose Andrés, Wylie Dufresne of wd~50, and Dan Barber of Blue Hill.

“Cooking provides an ideal framework to study a variety of complex phenomena—from basic chemistry to materials science to applied physics,” according to the physics professor David A. Weitz, one of the organizers of the course. “Much of what we do in the lab is what chefs like Ferran Adrià are now doing in their kitchens.” (In fact, El Bulli’s kitchen looked like a lab, with thirty-odd chefs and stagiaires in pristine whites lined up on either side of several spotless stainless steel cooking surfaces. There wasn’t a flame in sight, and just three hours before the first seating the atmosphere was strangely calm and focused.) The Harvard course grew out of a hugely popular one-night stand in 2008, when Adrià spoke to an overflow Harvard audience about such subjects as the use of hydrocolloids that allow delicate fruit or vegetable purees to be transformed into a dense gel, and techniques like spherification, creating a resistant skin of liquid—like my spherical martini olive.

Having never finished high school, Adrià seemed tremendously proud of the Harvard connection—and of the honorary degrees from several Spanish universities. He also seemed to value his invitation to participate in the 2007 Documenta, the quinquennial art fair in Kassel, Germany. Rather than performing or speaking at the fair, Adrià decided to make El Bulli a pavilion, albeit one some eight hundred miles away from Kassel. Every day two festivalgoers were invited to travel to Cala Montjoi, have dinner, and write about the experience; these collected essays, along with assorted photographs and documents, were published as
Food for Thought, Thought for Food
. The selection of Adrià was not without
controversy, some doubting that cooking and art were coextensive. But he himself is proud that the question’s been raised. “The word ‘artist’ can’t and shouldn’t be used in respect to chefs,” said Tony Bourdain, “with very few exceptions. Ferran Adrià is, without a doubt, an artist. I always find myself comparing Ferran to musicians—rather than other chefs. People like Jimi Hendrix … or Charlie Parker, who heard notes, heard music, where others heard nothing. Who made noises come out of their instruments that no one else had ever dreamed possible. I don’t know—but suspect—that Ferran, like Hendrix, like Parker, might find it a burden year after year to be that far out in front of everybody else. I can’t imagine what that pressure might be like.”

I’m not entirely certain whether what Adrià creates is art, but I can say that dining at El Bulli was a truly extraordinary aesthetic experience. I felt more than a little like Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. I’d worried that the meal would be too intellectual to be genuinely enjoyable—a rap that one hears against Adrià, especially from those who have never eaten here—but in fact it was a hedonistic revel, at once a feast and a mind game, Dionysus and Apollo wrestling on the plate, the senses ultimately triumphing over the brain in the end. At each stage it seemed hard to imagine how the kitchen could follow up on some particularly exquisite creation; yet the rhythm of the dinner felt perfect, the individual courses seeming to add up to something like a narrative, although it was definitely postmodern, rather than linear. There was a Japanese chapter of about seven courses, including the best miso soup I’ve ever tasted and ten iterations of soy on a single plate; another chapter focused on strictly local ingredients, including sea anemone and pine nuts. Sweet and savory elements alternated throughout. We sometimes couldn’t help laughing—beetroot cookie? Gorgonzola with chocolate?—though at other times we felt more like stout Cortés as described by Keats, stricken
silent with wonder at the spectacle. And for brief moments I actually felt high, as if I’d ingested some fast-acting THC or psilocybin.

It would be interesting, if utterly improbable, to imagine the diner who arrived with neither preconceptions nor expectations. The unfussy, rustic Mediterranean decor of the dining room certainly couldn’t prepare you for what was about to come. Your fellow diners are a mixed bunch: two well-dressed young newlyweds from France; a middle-aged New York couple in black; a Spanish couple in jeans and T-shirts; two glamorous women accompanying much older men, both in white jeans and skimpy tops, speaking English, one blonde with a French accent, the other brunette with an Italian. You might sense a certain giddiness in the air. Many of the diners are brandishing cameras, and Juli Soler, the maître d’hôtel, volunteers to take pictures. There is no silverware on the table, only a white linen tablecloth.

And then that deconstructed martini arrives, followed by four more “cocktails,” including what looks like a strawberry made from frozen Campari, a gin fizz “snow,” and a hot-and-cold gin fizz. At some point a piece of sculpture appears, a wavy blond convoluted ribbon that looks like a model of a deconstructed Eames chair, which the waiter insists is corn bread—without doubt the most delicious I’ve ever tasted, crunchy, salty, and slightly sweet. That’s followed by something resembling a softball. The waiter cracks it open, the substance in question about as thick as a Christmas tree ornament, and sprinkles it with nutmeg. It’s a sphere of semi-frozen Gorgonzola.

My wife’s two favorite foods are bone marrow and oysters, but she never thought she’d eat them together, out of an oyster shell, or that the combination would be brilliant. Only a fanatic would try to match a wine to every course—though it’s apparently been done. Instead, we drink Champagne, which is what the chef has recommended, or rather we drink one bottle of Champagne,
another of Cava, the sparkling wine associated with Catalonia. The latter is the 2004 Kripta Brut Nature Gran Reserva, a toasty, rich bubbly that reminded me more than a little of the slightly oxidative Krug style. It came in a great bottle with a rounded bottom and needed to be kept upright in an ice bucket. The Champagne is one of my favorites, the VO from Anselme Selosse, the leading light of the small-grower movement. Although he recommends sparkling wine, Adrià himself favors beer. He consults for one of Spain’s biggest breweries and came up with the idea for a beer in an attractive wine-like bottle for the fine-restaurant trade. (Adrià consults for several major Spanish food and beverage corporations, which helps subsidize El Bulli.)