Your view of Ferran Adria will depend entirely upon who you are. If you’re one of those who spends whatever extra income you might have in the world’s luxury restaurants, you will regard him as the gastro-wizard-in-chief, the man who at El Bulli, his restaurant north of Barcelona, moved haute gastronomy on from the calcifying tropes of nouvelle cuisine to a brave new modernist tomorrow; who ushered in the age of foams and hot jellies, spherified olives and desserts cooked in liquid nitrogen. If you are not one of those people you will, at best, know he’s some chef. Otherwise, you’ll greet his name with a shrug.
Which makes the claim of this new biography of Adria, by the American food writer Colman Andrews, that he “changed the way we eat,” look terribly fragile. El Bulli may have been regularly voted the best restaurant in the world. There may well be two million requests each year for seats in a joint that serves just 7,000 or so during its seven-month season. And it really may be one of the most blissful eating experiences there is; I cling to my memory of eating there in 2008, like a child to the scent of its mother. It was wistful, playful, intense, witty, challenging and, most of all, delicious.
But for all that, the impact on how we really eat has been negligible. Sure, the tiny numbers that throng the tiny cutting-edge restaurants of the world will have noted the change. To cook at the very highest level without acknowledging the El Bulli agenda is unthinkable. British chefs such as Jason Atherton, Sat Bains and, of course, Heston Blumenthal could not have flourished without him.
Indeed, serving a menu today that ignores this kind of modernist food is as active a way of acknowledging El Bulli’s influence as mimicking its dishes might be. As for everyone else, what we eat has been influenced not at all. We do not eat spherified steaks at home, or serve one another soups out of soda siphons, let alone turn every meal into a 26 mini-course extravaganza. For the most part, the domestic food experience and the restaurant experience are as far apart as ever.
Andrews might have been on safer ground if he had suggested that Adria had changed the way we cook, for there can be little doubt that the methods he and his collaborators have developed really have trickled down to us, in the way haute couture eventually reaches the high street.
Perhaps it has not yet reached as far as the home environment, but certainly it has entered the mass restaurant industry. The cooking of ingredients under vacuum is omnipresent, as is the use of what might once have been considered obscure gels and emulsifiers. This makes a certain kind of sense because, as Adria explains, a lot of the processes he brought into the gastronomic kitchen came in the first place from the industrial food process.
The exposition of all this method — and the critiques of it from those who believe it takes restaurant food too far from the original ingredients — is interesting enough. The problem for Andrews, as he readily acknowledges, is that El Bulli itself has done such an extraordinary job of cataloguing its own work — putting out coffee-table books the size of coffee tables, detailing every single dish and method developed — that there isn’t much left to say. Adria and his team barely make their morning espresso without a camera crew in attendance these days.
The more intriguing story, which Andrews tells very well, is how what started in the 1960s as a hippy beach cafe on an all but unreachable cove became first a restaurant, then a gastronomic restaurant cleaving to the trend for nouvelle cuisine, and then something else entirely, the flag-waver for a vanguard. Hand in hand with this is the story of Adria himself: an ordinary bloke who had been cooking for years before he really committed to it, who as a young man was more interested in soccer and chasing girls than creating a single morsel of food anybody would remember. Inevitably, the narrative only seems to make any sense in retrospect.
Indeed, there is a gaping hole in the story. At one point Adria is simply updating Catalan classics. The next he is on holiday in the Canary Islands, attempting to make gravity-defying mousses, and his journey into the future has begun. If there was a eureka moment, a single experiment which made the chef think that he was on to something, we are never told about it.
But we do get insights into the autodidact’s approach to creativity. He comes up with a rigorous regime for thinking differently; applies himself to developing a whole new grammar for gastronomy rather than just a sparse vocabulary of specific dishes.
Anybody who has sat through one of the chef’s speeches will know that no one takes this notion of the man as a creator — indulging in concepts as evolved as those of any artists — as seriously as Adria himself. He appears to see himself as part of the playful Catalan tradition that embraces both Salvador Dali and Antoni Gaudi. In the sense that his work elicits genuine anger in some, and causes others to reference the emperor’s new clothes while arguing that it is a rejection of the mainstream, the connection is apt.
Likewise, Adria’s recent announcement that he plans to close his restaurant in its present form in 2012 and reopen it as some sort of cultural-gastronomic foundation has been seen as a classic piece of provocation, not least by the millions who, year after year, have attempted but failed to bag a reservation.
Now they know that the chance to taste Adria’s food, to make their own minds up as to whether it really was the best restaurant in the world or just some victory of hype and whimsy over form, is all but gone. For them, this book is as close as they are ever likely to get to enjoying El Bulli for themselves. And sadly, given the visceral nature of eating at the restaurant, it’s not very close at all.
CORRECTION: In Sunday’s issue, we printed an incorrect byline to this book review. The story was written by Jay Rayner of the Observer, not Dwight Garner of the New York Times. The Taipei Times regrets the error.
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