On Monday night the world's top chefs and critics met in London for the S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants Award and, for the fourth time and third consecutive year, awarded the number one slot to El Bulli. It's an amazing achievement by any standards but perhaps not much of a surprise. In the 21 years since Ferran Adrià became head chef at the restaurant in Roses on the Costa Brava, his rise to success has run parallel with the explosion in fine dining and the attendant phenomenon of gastro-tourism. In the past two decades, a golden age for the restaurant business, Adrià has become the single most significant player in the culinary world, almost universally loved and respected by customers, cooks and critics.
The story of Adrià's rise is well documented. As a teenager he worked as a dishwasher in hotel kitchens and began learning traditional Spanish cuisine. At the age of 19, while drafted for military service, he became a cook and was quickly placed on the personal staff of a high-ranking officer.
At 22 he became a line cook at the already successful El Bulli restaurant, citing as his major motivation the desire to meet the girls who hung out at the nearby beach. Within 18 months he was head chef. The style of cooking Adrià pioneered, along with chefs such as Heston Blumenthal in the UK and Pierre Gagnaire in France, has been termed "molecular gastronomy" though Adrià himself doesn't recognise the title. As he says: "People write that I began molecular cooking but if you ask them no one can define what it is." Instead, he refers to his style, if pressed, as "avant garde" or "deconstructivist".
When nouvelle cuisine first appeared in the 70s, there was a small body of restaurant goers and a tiny coterie of restaurant critics to notice. Today, the pronouncements of restaurant cuisine's most prominent theorist affect an industry that starts in the dining rooms of Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide and spreads through the ever-growing food media - television, books, journalism, a vast subculture of online chef-watchers - and at conferences such as Madrid Fusion. The event itself would have been impossible to conceive of even a decade ago, where chefs exchange ideas, techniques and philosophy, and occasionally present manifestos.
Adrià is usually set up as the brooding, saturnine genius. Though in the dark corner of the hotel bar where we are granted a brief audience just hours before Monday's award ceremony he's dapper and immaculately turned out, with a disarmingly twinkly eyed manner. He speaks no English so his interviews always feature an interpreter, a fact that probably explains the tone of his statements: a complex philosophy of food expressed by a genius in ornate Spanish then mediated through an intense acolyte has an odd quality. About his restaurant, for example, he says: "Being intellectual can be almost anybody, but having soul and emotion ... A man in the fields, collecting things, a normal worker, he can also have feelings, soul and emotion. If you do not work at El Bulli it is impossible to understand." Though he endeavours to clarify: "It is like a building. You can see the building, you can feel the emotion, but you cannot intellectualise the building because you have not studied it. You must study El Bulli to understand it.
And El Bulli is certainly studied by legions of fans and would-be diners around the world. It is closed for six months of each year while Adrià works on the next menu in his laboratory. The restaurant is permanently booked up and currently turns down three-quarters of a million requests for tables every year. At the moment, according to the foodie websites where such things are endlessly discussed, the best way to get a table is to book 10 days' holiday in Barcelona, phone each morning to ensure you're on the cancellations list, keep your mobile switched on and be prepared to drop everything. There are lists of other, merely brilliant, restaurants where you can console yourself while waiting for the call.
To add to the palpable sense of panic among the gastro-pilgrims, there is the persistent, tantalising rumour that he's going to shut the whole place down. "We know about the rumours," Adrià says, "and we're not going to close El Bulli." There is a deft pause before he continues: "But every single day we must face the challenge to reinvent the model through which we express ourselves. In the end, the important thing is what we say. Perhaps the model may change.
To those outside the food world, Adrià is a gift - the wacky food science makes for great headlines. There's always a ready one-liner in his apparently absurd notion of serving lunch as a foam - even though he says he stopped doing this in 1998 - and it may well be true that Adrià's work will have little long-term influence on the way we eat at home.
But his real coup has been much more significant than the science tricks. He has, perhaps unintentionally, become the figurehead of a global rebellion against the culinary hegemony of France. Though brilliant young chefs all over the world were innovating frantically, the measure against which they tested themselves was always classical French cuisine, until Adrià's scientific approach, inspired by the work of, among others, French physical chemist Hervé This, who led Adrià to deconstruct ingredients and dishes.
Deconstructing recipes and ingredients by definition makes the combinations of a traditional canon irrelevant. Suddenly the world's best food was not about 400 years of French tradition but ingredients, technique and creativity. At the conclusion of his long acceptance speech at the awards last night, Adrià invited his compatriot Spanish chefs onto the stage at the Freemasons Hall in London to celebrate the fact that their country had more chefs in the top 10 than any other - even France. It's no wonder chefs love Adrià. His personality validates them as artists, his stature puts reviewers and critics in their place, his technique opens new possibilities and his non-Frenchness gives chefs of every nationality an equal chance to succeed. Adrià became a standard around which innovating chefs could cluster, giving restaurant cooking a new direction.
In a 2006 speech, he said: "One day people will come to my restaurant not for nourishment, but for an experience," a statement that seemed to open a whole new territory, beyond food, into which creative chefs can expand. And creativity, never commercialism, is what, he says, drives him. "It is impossible to combine the goal of making money with making people happy with what we do," he says. And yet nor does he care about making everybody happy. "In the end, what is important is what you have inside yourself, what you believe - not the opinion of 10 million."
Because he's Spanish, because of his creativity and his iconoclasm, Adrià is often placed in the tradition of Gaudí, Dali or Picasso. These might be useful comparisons but, like many creative people recognised in their own lifetimes, Adrià has also come to represent something more: his importance reaches far beyond the food he can create and the diners he can please by serving it.
As he held aloft his award on Monday night and gave his thanks and dedications, it seemed that, like a film star whose presence somehow transcends his performances, he has become an icon, representing how the whole of the "fine dining" world see themselves.
Yet with his creativity and cheerful disregard for convention he could at any moment turn his back on the whole of the industry, and it would only increase their regard for him. And might he? Could the most important chef in generations succeed in deconstructing himself out of running a restaurant?
"But, of course," he answers, smiling, "El Bulli is not a restaurant. We don't make any money. The books, the hotel, the other businesses, they make money. But it would not be possible to make money and continue to do what we do at El Bulli. We want to experiment, to please people, but we would never change something we do because of what people say. Is that a restaurant?"
Source: Guardian
Vocabulary Focus
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