Ferran Adrià at the Southbank Centre

Ferran Adrià at the Southbank Centre

25 November, 2008
by: Emma

A gigantic screen looms above us with a picture of a book emblazoned on the screen. On it is the inscription:  Best Chef in The World: Ferran Adrià. Best restaurant in the World: el Bulli.  This is not just a talk by a guy with some Michelin stars (though he does have three); this is someone who will go down in history as a gastronomic pioneer, hailed the 'Picasso of Cuisine', named one of the Top 100 Influential People in the World by Time Magazine, voted number one in the list of the Ten Most Influential Chefs in the Last Ten Years by 60 leading food critics…you get the picture, he's big news.

The talk is part of a promotional tour for Adrià's tome A Day at el Bulli, which, at over 600 pages, is a painstaking and beautiful documentation of recipes, techniques, history and photography from the restaurant voted the best in the world for the second consecutive year.  It is also however, a chance for Adrià to explain some of the myths and some of the secrets of his cooking which many have labelled 'molecular gastronomy’.

He is clearly exasperated by this term and on the big screen shows us some photos of desserts made at el Bulli and the steps involved in their creation.  The first we see are various sponge cakes made by pouring cake mixture into an ISI cream whipper and squirting it into small ramekins.  These are then microwaved for a minute or so and are apparently 'the lightest, fluffiest cakes you will ever eat.' Adrià asks us how this is scientific when the microwave and the cream whipper/siphon have both been commonplace since the 70's.  As he puts it his cooking is avant-garde haute cuisine, not something you need a laboratory for.  Any one of us could make a foam or 'espuma' at home and some ravers amongst you might well already have the materials to do it.  All you need are is a cream whipper and some chargers, readily available for purchase online.

Another set of clips shows some fruits made out of sorbet and jelly that could easily be mistaken for the real thing.  Again this is not rocket science, it's made by pouring sorbet or jelly into some moulds but it's the attention to detail in the moulds and the different colours that go into each 'fruit' that make them exceptional.  What about the liquid nitrogen, that's hardly something you can order from Lakeland is it? "Liquid nitrogen is a product like anything else", says Adrià.  As we see balloons filled with tomato gel and dipped in the nitrogen emerge as glorious little red orbs with oozy centres, I begin to start thinking about where one can order liquid nitrogen online and whether I'll need to wear gloves?

Adrià compares the cooking at el Bulli to creating a new language. At first his team only knew one letter the 'espuma', or foam, and for the first year there were only about five dishes - all with foams.  Now they have 30 different courses which are created with dozens of different techniques, so they have a whole new alphabet to create words and dialogue with food that has never been used before.  A better description of his style is perhaps 'deconstruction', where he reduces a dish like tortilla to its original components (pictured below): potato foam with onion pureé and egg white sabayon (or frothy sauce in layman's terms).  All the tastes are familiar but delivered in foreign forms and textures such as his famous Kellogg's paella made from Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-flavoured mashed potatoes.

One thing is clear: you don't go to el Bulli for a piss-up with friends and a good feed (the maximum size table is six).  "It is not about social traditions, it is about an experience", Adrià tells us.

So how does one get a table at a restaurant that is only open for six months a year, gets 2,000,000 annual requests for dinner and only has 8,000 places?  Adrià has a rule: 50% have never eaten there before and 50% have been once.  Apparently the artist Richard Hamilton is the only man to have dined at el Bulli regularly since it opened, and is subsequently the only man allowed back every year.  "My head waiter Lluís Garcia deals with all the e-mails and I don't know how he chooses." Hmmm.  How about this tack then.  "Dear Mr Garcia, my ___is dying, his/her last wish before he/she joins the angels in heaven is to eat at el Bulli.  Any chance of a table?"

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Emma