Yes, well. For every foodie who ever clapped his or her hands in delight at such alchemy, such hectic prestidigitation, there have been many others who've dismissed it with an oath. Adria's critics call his experiments precious, tiresome, pretentious and tricksy, more about showing off than preparing edible meals. And it must be said, what seemed inspired, magical and cutting-edge in the 1990s has lost some of its wow factor in the 2010s, when foams, spumes and frizzes can now be found in the kitchens of provincial hotels, and when Britain's home-grown Adria, Heston Blumenthal, has stamped his name on the concept of molecular gastronomy.
El Bulli still stands as a monument to cooking at its most conceptually sublime. It's been described as "the most imaginative generator of haute cuisine on the planet". But it took a while to get that way.
It was built by a German doctor called Hans Schilling who, with his wife Marketta, discovered the picturesque cove of Cala Montjoi on Spain's Costa Brava, two hours' drive north of Barcelona in the late 1950s. They bought five acres of land as a money-making venture, built a mini-golf course and added a snack bar on the beach. When the golf course failed to find many takers, they converted the snack bar into a restaurant and named it after Marketta's French bulldogs.
When it opened its doors in 1964, it was singularly unpromising. It had no telephone. The road to the nearest village, Roses, was atrociously rough, rocky and pitted, so much so that the village shops refused to deliver produce. It took El Bulli a decade to hit its prize-winning stride, when the Schillings signed up Jean-Louis Neichel to be their chef in 1975. The young Frenchman won his first Michelin star a year later. The next chef, Jean-Paul Vinay, added a second star in 1983 - the same year that Ferran Adria happened by.
He was 21, the son of a Barcelonan plasterer and a mother who ran a beauty parlour. A keen footballer, and high school dropout, he'd done his military service in an admiral's kitchen, where he met young chef Fermi Puig. The two young Turks taught themselves classic French cuisine, displayed a remarkable aptitude for it, and Fermi suggested Adria try working for El Bulli because it had two Michelin stars. Adria later recalled that at the time he had no idea what that meant. But he made the pilgrimage, as so many other chefs have done, joined the staff in 1983 and became sole chef de cuisine in 1987.
That year, he had his road-to-Damascus moment. Inspired by a lecture from French chef Jacques Maximin - who made such dishes as duck mousse inside turnip-petal ravioli and whose watchword was "creativity means not copying" - Adria threw himself into experimentation. El Bulli was closed for six months while he closeted himself away with a battery of machines and a head full of ideas. "To cook well," he once wrote, "it is essential to learn history, techniques, products, tradition and innovation, culinary processes ... and then to think, discuss, try out, reflect, choose ..." With his brother, Albert, who joined El Bulli as a pastry chef in 1985, Adria transformed himself into a Dr Jekyll-style lab rat. He experimented with hydrocollids, which transform fruit puree into a dense gel. He toyed with thickening agents such as xanthan gum and algin. He played with freeze-drying, spherification (which puts a skin around liquids), Pacojets and liquid nitrogen.
He would try anything. In a recent biography by Colman Andrews, there's a charming vignette of Adria standing in the kitchen, holding a bowl of almond-milk gelatine and looking meaningfully at a pot of boiling oil on the stove. One by one his colleagues, guessing what he had in mind, began to shout, "No, Ferran! Don't do it!" Too late. He threw in the gelatine and the mixture exploded.
He has come up with more than 1200 dishes over the past 24 years. The El Bulli catalogue of ingredients and recipes runs to 8000 pages. And, it must be said, not all have been greeted with unalloyed delight. There were surprisingly few takers for his "Sea Anemone 2008", which interestingly combined sea anemones and oysters with raw rabbit brains.
From 1987, however, his reputation grew and grew. In 1996, the year before Adria won his third Michelin star, the great Joel Robuchon announced that he was the finest chef on the planet, and nominated the Spanish maestro as his "heir", an adoption that went down badly with French haute-cuisineurs. Other chefs, even the famously combative Gordon Ramsay, concurred. In 2006, Restaurant magazine dubbed El Bulli the world's best restaurant, a title it held until it was toppled by the Copenhagen-based Noma in 2010.
Adria's success, however, never translated into riches. He never expanded El Bulli. It continued to feed just 50 people per session, while employing 42 chefs in the gleaming kitchen. Although it received more than two millions requests for reservations a year, it fed only 8000 patrons annually. Did I say annually? Adria closed the place for half the year. He opened for business only from June to October - taking all the bookings on a single day - and spent the rest of the time experimenting in the kitchen-laboratory he calls El Taller.
He could have charged any sum and punters would have paid it for the unique experience, but he charged a flat €250 ($423) per meal. As a result, El Bulli has operated at a loss for the past decade, though Adria enjoys a tidy second income from selling books - especially the massively detailed A Day at El Bulli.
"In 2001 when El Bulli was becoming very well known," he told Jay McInerney in a Vanity Fair interview last October, "the logical thing would have been to open year-round. But for us, the most important thing was creativity. So we decided to close for lunch, and the level of creativity kept getting higher. But at some point I realised we wouldn't be able to evolve as a restaurant."
So what happens now? After the valedictory blow-out a fortnight ago, when the last 50 diners polished off the final spheroidal lychees, El Bulli was no more.
The place will remain as an experimental zone, with little for the foodie to put in his mouth and chew. "The Taller, the workshop, has long been a centre of creativity," Adria told me. "But it will now go on year-round. The team will be bigger, it'll be like a private foundation, and they will share the results of their work online. They will create and someday, somebody will try out what they've done. We must have some kind of feedback. But the mission is to be creative."
In a very perverse move, that will have foodies all over the world scratching their heads, Adria is bringing out a new book this October - but it's not what you'd expect at all. The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria (Phaidon) is a plain-as-a-pikestaff guide to simple cuisine (spaghetti with tomato and basil, salt cod with braised vegetables) that features 1500 colour illustrations and step-by-step instructions, as though for slightly dim children. It's a world away from the stratospheric inventions and mad-scientist visions of his Catalonian laboratory. Some will feel it's a shocking anti-climax that the man who woke up the world to whole new forms of gastronomy should close down his operationand retreat from the actual business of serving food to hungry humans, into the chilly back room with microscopes and enzyme-buffers.
But that's genius for you. "The mission is to be creative," he told me for the umpteenth time. "It's like investigating new material for chairs. Asking who is going to sit on them isn't important. What's important is to keep on researching."
- INDEPENDENT
