Spanish chef Ferran Adria is having a break from El Bulli, but will continue to experiment in the kitchen.
I first heard about Ferran Adria from Gordon Ramsay in 2003. Ramsay is not a man to fling compliments around, but he spoke about the Barcelonan super-chef with something approaching awe. "The man is a genius," he said. "He's got three Michelin stars, and he serves Fisherman's Friend icecream. It's cooking 20 years ahead of its time."
Tell me more, I said. "Last year he was obsessed with clingfilm," said Ramsay. "But the clingfilm turned out to be the food itself: there was a little sachet of peas, a transparent slice of clingfilm made out of peas, and tasting of peas. Just staggering. The year before, it was cauliflower couscous, which was grated cauliflower, blast-frozen. This guy will go round the dining room with an aerosol can of lemongrass and spray it in front of your mouth before you eat. The last dish I had there was cockles and mussels and oysters with a passionfruit soup - but the passionfruit soup was made with seawater."
Going to Adria's restaurant, El Bulli, was he said, "the trip to the food Mecca of today".
Seven years later, so many people have called Adria "the world's greatest chef" that it has become a cliché. Millions of wannabe-gourmands have tried and failed to score a table at the restaurant, which is open only for a few months a year. Scratch any award-winning, world-beating chef of the last decade, whether Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, or Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck, or Rene Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen, and they'll talk about Adria as their cher maitre and El Bulli as the mother ship of their wildest gastro-excursions.
Many people call him the creator of, or mastermind behind, "molecular cuisine" - a phrase he detests. Others hold him responsible for the foams, spumes, frizzes and other ectoplasmic irritations found in so many restaurant dishes today.
This is closer to the truth - Adria, using compressed air rather than cream and egg, has contrived to make beetroot foam, mushroom foam and, indeed, meat foam - but is only a small part of the story.
Closeted with a mystic brotherhood of chefs in El Taller, the laboratory at El Bulli, he has experimented with every food on the planet, umpteen bizarre kitchen appliances (freeze-dryer, Pacojet, liquid nitrogen tank) and a private pharmacology of emulsifiers, acidifiers, galling agents and "spherifiers", to create a kind of parallel universe of food, in which melon is re-imagined as orange caviar balls, warring flavours are pulled into startling alliance (like tobacco-flavoured blackberry crushed ice) and classic dishes are "deconstructed" so that a Spanish omelette, becomes a sherry glass of potato foam, onion puree and egg-white sabayon, topped with deep-fried potato crumbs.
His cuisine has drawn criticism, on grounds both of pretentiousness and health considerations, but an army of admirers has written admiring explanations of his career and modus operandi. The most recent is Reinventing Food - Ferran Adria: The man who changed the way we eat, by American food writer Colman Andrews.
As El Bulli prepares to close in July after 50 years (it will be transformed into a creativity centre in 2014 "a think tank for creative cuisine and gastronomy), Adria is in London for a rare audience with the press. Clad in a dark sweater and sheeny black jacket, Adria is a short, stocky, strikingly handsome chap with a wide acreage of forehead, dark-brown marbles for eyes, and a fussily expressive speaking voice.
Andrews explains in the book that this is because his tongue has to be unnaturally large to accommodate so many taste buds. I cannot tell if he is kidding.
Adria was born Fernando Adria I Acosta in 1962 in the city of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, south-west of Barcelona. His father, Gines, was a plasterer; his mother worked in a beauty salon. As a child, his favourite food was disappointingly mundane - steak and potatoes, tortillas, liquorice and chocolate bars. Did he recall vivid dishes his parents enjoyed?
"You can't remember what you ate when you were six. I have a special memory about my mother's Spanish omelette, but if I had to give her a technical exam, I'm not sure she'd pass. But she's still the best mum in the world."
At school he played football to a high level, and considered making a career of it. But when he had to choose between spending Saturdays on the pitch or washing dishes in the kitchen of the Hotel Playafels, he plumped for the latter. There, he was handed a copy of El Practico, the Spanish bible of international cooking. He still has it. "I learned from it to respect history. And that you cannot move forward if you don't respect the past."
At only 22, he took the rocky road to El Bulli, then a respected but scarcely avant-garde Catalan restaurant, to work as a line chef. Among his influences was the French chef, Jacques Maximin, "the Bonaparte of the ovens,"whose dishes included duck mousse inside turnip-petal ravioli. Adria relished his dictum "Creativity means not copying." But hadn't he borrowed some of Maximin's ideas?
"One has to be honest with creativity," said Adria. "Because everybody is susceptible to influence. The most important thing is creating that first omelette, not making 10,000 different kinds of omelette. Maximin's character influenced me, especially conceptually. His recipes weren't actual recipes, they were conceptual. For example, in his book there was asparagus icecream. But it was a concept. He didn't see it as a dessert. He thought: this is an icecream made with vegetables."
Adria's first great period of experimentation dates from this period when, with El Bulli shut for six months, he closeted himself away with a battery of machines and processes. He would try anything. There's a charming vignette in the biography, about him standing in the kitchen with a bowl of almond-milk gelatin in his hand, looking at a pot of boiling oil on the stove. One by one his comrades realised what he was planning and shouted, "No, Ferran, don't!" But he did. He spooned the gelatine into the boiling oil and it exploded all over the kitchen.
Among the 1200-plus dishes with which he has amazed diners over the years, some have failed to find an appreciative audience. Even Adria's biographer draws the line at his "Sea Anemone 2008", which combines sea anemone, raw rabbit brains, and oysters in a lukewarm dill broth.
"I found it so utterly unpleasant that I wondered whether Ferran had gone off the rails," writes Andrews. Does Adria believe he has a faultless palate? "It's a very good question. If we like our meat medium-rare or practically raw, is this right? Does that mean that people who prefer their meat well done are incorrect? If I create a dish, I love it - otherwise I wouldn't cook it. But I know some dishes will create a debate or be challenging." Was it his intention to combine flavours in a divine harmony? Or to stun people, by putting together completely alien flavours? Adria thought about it: "It depends. A menu is like the script of a film. There are moments of love. And there are moments when you want to kill someone."
Do his lunchers and diners ever want to kill him? He smiled. "People who come to El Bulli sometimes find it difficult to say there's something that they don't like. They usually say such-and-such a dish was 'strange'. But if you eat 40 things and don't like three, that's not a bad strike rate."
His main devotion is to the utmost enhancement of flavour. His gazpacho ajo blanco comes as a white, shaved-ice granite but gives you the purest belt of summer gazpacho, garlic and almonds you'll ever taste. "His spherical olives," says Andrews, "taste more like olives than olives do. Because he's taken out the pith - which, if you isolated it in the laboratory, wouldn't have much flavour."
Some might say Adria has been taking the pith out of the gastronomic world for years; but he's robust in rejecting criticism that his experiments put diners' health at risk. "In November, I will be presenting a book about health and nutrition with one of the world's leading cardio-logists," he said, with indignation. "Do you think if my cooking wasn't healthy I would be asked to collaborate? Do you think Harvard would invite me to lecture? Would I have a laureateship in chemistry [actually an honorary degree from Aberdeen University] if I didn't know about all these things?"
One doesn't want to tangle with the maestro. One just wants to try his food. Regrettably, El Bulli is about to shut up shop for at least a couple of years, while Adria and his team take stock and consider the future.
The laboratory will meanwhile become "a centre for creativity", and its experiments will be monitored by a science foundation. The actual restaurant may not be open for business again until 2014.
"The mission," says Adria, "is to be creative. It's like investigating new material for chairs. Asking who's going to sit on them isn't important. What's important is to keep on researching."
- INDEPENDENT
