After all the press lavished on Ferran Adría and his restaurant El Bullí, Lisa Abend—an American food writer based in Spain—took a fresh behind-the-scenes angle: Profiling the apprentices who put their careers on hold for six months to learn from the master.
Although European chefs have practiced locavore, or farm-to-table, cuisine for centuries, an emphasis on exotic ingredients and year-round availability in recent decades had displaced what was once a necessary tradition. Now, as that old kind of eating becomes fashionable once again and an evergrowing number of chefs seek out heirloom vegetables and pastured meat, the product itself has assumed greater importance. Santamaria, who has always featured local, Catalan ingredients and techniques in his cooking but certainly isn’t averse to serving a tomato in February or importing oysters from Normandy, appropriated the rhetoric of this new movement in his attack on avantgarde cuisine.
Here too, Ferran feels compelled to defend himself against misconceptions about what goes on in his kitchen. Yes, he serves Japanese tofu and Ecuadoran roses and Dutch succulents and French smoked butter. “But did you taste this?” he will ask, holding out a raw leaf, or smearing an uncooked dab onto your hand. “It’s the best in the world.” Like any other decent chef, Ferran can get very excited by a product that does nothing more exotic than taste good. And he can be just as disappointed when it doesn’t live up to his expectations, no matter how rare or unusual it is. When a shipment of Lola tomatoes that he tasted a few weeks earlier finally comes in—the fruit elongated like a jalapeño and packed preciously in straw—he opens the box with the joy of a child at Christmas. Immediately, he grabs a knife and starts slicing into a tomato. One piece, then two, then another; the tomato has disappeared, and still he can’t stop eating. He starts in on another.
He pauses to issue the usual verdict. “These are the best tomatoes in the world,” he says before taking another slice.
This time, however, something stops him, and he pauses in midchew. “There are seeds in this. Last time there weren’t seeds.” He chews a little more, then picks up a whole tomato and looks at it skeptically. “They’re good, or even very good, but ....” His thoughts trail off, but he closes the box; for the moment, Lola tomatoes don’t look to have a future at elBulli. “This is the most stressful part,” he shrugs. “You never know what the product will be like.”
Lola tomatoes come from a producer a few hundred kilometers down the Mediterranean coast, in Alicante. Does that make them local or not? The question doesn’t trouble Ferran. His policy has always been to start close to home and work his way out, letting quality, more than any other factor, including price, be the chief determinant. If he can get better-tasting tomatoes from Alicante than he can from a farmer in the nearby town of Figueres, he will choose Alicante. And in fact the shopping list for the restaurant forms a series of concentric circles expanding ever outward in space and time—daily shopping at the market in Roses, every other day in Figueras, twice weekly at the Boqueria in Barcelona, once-a-week shipments from everywhere else. If the restaurant imports its organic milk from Germany but gathers pine nuts from the trees just outside the kitchen door, it is because those products, he says, are the best.
Amid the snark and the side taking of the Santamaria escándalo, one important point about elBulli’s cuisine has been obscured. It is not uncommon for critics to characterize some of Ferran’s most iconic techniques—the foam, the spherification, the liquid nitrogen—as mere novelty for the sake of novelty or showmanship for the sake of showmanship. But ask him why he invented these techniques, and his answer will always come down to the chef’s holy grail: flavor. Foam, that early revolution, was designed in the quest to make a mousse without gelatin or cream. Liquid nitrogen creates a sorbet without the sugar that would normally be necessary to keep it from forming hard, icy crystals. Xantana allows a cook to thicken a sauce without flour or butter. Spherification permits the diner to eat liquids, not drink them. The things that chefs traditionally add to a preparation to transform its texture—butter, sugar, cream, vegetable purée, flour—may be delicious, but they also dilute the flavor of the primary ingredients. Yet if you add Xantana to chicken stock, you’ll have a sauce that tastes of nothing but chicken. Turn the juice from shucked oysters into foam using nothing more than a siphon, and you’ll have a mousse that tastes solely of the sea. Freeze a mango purée with liquid nitrogen, and you will get a sorbet that tastes shockingly of only ripe fruit.
Ferran uses hydrocolloids and high-tech machines because they allow him to make a product taste more like what it is. But he is just as likely to set those additives and technologies aside if they don’t bring anything to the plate. Although it took a few years, he has by now learned that he doesn’t necessarily need them to create the provocative, magical dishes he adores. One of the most beloved dishes of the 2009 season, for example, perfectly captures the essence of autumn and enchants diners by forcing them to reexamine their preconceptions, but is also startlingly simple: a large, empty wineglass filled with a scandalously abundant amount of fresh white truffle, shaved tableside. It is a ridiculously luxurious dish, made all the more so by the fact that the diner isn’t meant to eat the unadorned truffle, only smell it. Truffles don’t have any real taste, Ferran explains, only aroma; smell them deeply, and you’ll have a fuller experience. Chef Denis Martin, who tried the dish on his annual visit to elBulli, agreed. “It’s a cretinous idea—truffles alone in a glass!” he ranted. “Idiotic! Stupid! But it’s pure genius.” Especially because, after the table has had its fill of the scent, the servers bring out plates of sweet potato gnocchi, sauced with butter and sprinkled with more truffle shavings. The diners sniff the glass, then take a bite, intensifying the flavor of what is in their mouths into a near frenzy of truffle-ness. On this, as with the liquid nitrogen sorbet or Xantana-thickened stock, the point is always the same. “It’s about purity,” Ferran says. “Purity of flavor.”
With those words, he exposes the lie behind the now-common tendency to position what we might call a cuisine of the product against a cuisine of elaboration. In its most virulent form, the tendency pits “organic,” “farm-fresh” cooking that “respects” the ingredients against cooking that is “technical,” “molecular,” “manipulated.” (The virulence runs both ways—not long ago David Chang provoked a minor firestorm in culinary circles when he accused San Francisco chefs of doing nothing more than setting some “figs on a plate.”) But as Ferran points out, all cooking—even splitting open those figs and drizzling them with a little honey—is manipulation, and to attempt to assign a value to the degree of elaboration that occurs in the kitchen is an impossible task. Product versus Manipulation is a false dichotomy.
Yet Ferran is not content simply to emphasize flavor. If he were, he would be serving that liquid-nitrogenized mango sorbet alone in a bowl. He combines pure flavors in new, provocative ways and brings new techniques to the same task not just because they are amusing or taste good but because, in doing so, he allows his diners to reexamine their expectations of what food is and what it can be. Manipulation, in other words, is where the art happens. It is this ambition, this sense that his dishes are reaching for something more than simply tasting good, that irks his critics. His crime is less that he breaks or refuses to acquiesce to long-established rules (savory comes before sweet; sauce is liquid, not solid) than that he dares to ask, demands to ask, really, can food be art? Behind the rivalries both personal and nationalistic, the purportedly antagonistic ideologies of manipulation versus product, lurks this question.
Can food be art? Adoring diners have declared chefs since Marie-Antoine Carême worthy of the title artist, but it sometimes seems that until Ferran, no one really took the question seriously. Indeed, when Ferran was invited in 2007 to participate in Documenta, an important contemporary art fair held every five years in Kassel, Germany (his contribution was to serve dinner to a couple chosen daily from among the fairgoers in Kassel and sent to elBulli for the night), his inclusion prompted outrage among some critics precisely because he was being treated like any other artist. Skeptics complained that including a cook signaled the banalization of Documenta. “Both Adrià’s participation and contribution seem ridiculous to me,” sniffed the art critic Robert Hughes, adding definitively, if reductively, that “food is food.” Even the show’s organizers seemed unwilling to make a conclusive statement on the question. “We aren’t saying that cooking is a new art form. We’re saying that Ferran Adrià shows artistic intelligence,” said the curator, Ruth Noack. “And besides, compared to [Jeff] Koons, who’s banal? Banality in art isn’t a question of medium but of complexity.” Although Ferran is frequently and commonly compared to Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Antoni Gaudí—all three radical innovators with ties to Catalonia—the question “Is he an artist?” still circles back on itself, never conclusively resolved, yet impossible to avoid and occasionally polarizing in its implication that one chef, at least, is more of an artist than any other.
Ferran’s own evolution on this question has been striking. During the early years of his renown, he was most closely identified with scientists. Much of this reputation was surely enflamed by the media, who loved to depict the chef holding bubbling test tubes aloft or working fixatedly with centrifuges. But Ferran himself encouraged the connection by actively seeking relationships with scientists, especially the chemist Pere Castells, who first introduced him to xanthan gum. In 2004, he became a founding member and director of the Alicia Foundation, a Catalan institution dedicated to studying the intersections of science and food. He still remains involved with the scientific world; in 2010, he helped teach a course in Harvard University’s science department. Yet over time, he has moved slightly away from this identification or at least complicated it; he has in fact admitted that his original hope for Alicia—that the foundation would advance the technique of haute cuisine—has not borne fruit. His formerly close relationship with science has been, if not replaced, at least pushed aside to make room for a connection with the art world.
At the time of Documenta, when he was asked whether he saw himself as an artist, he refused to answer the question clearly. He took care to emphasize that other media, like photography, had encountered artistic resistance when they were first introduced, but overall said he preferred to stay out of the debate about whether what he does is art or not. “That’s for other people to decide,” he said at the time. “Cooking is cooking. And if it exists alongside art, that’s wonderful.” But that was in 2007. These days his primary connections outside the culinary world proper—at least the ones that most excite him—are with the arts. In 2009, he was invited to participate in more than a dozen arts conferences, was the subject of a well-received Parisian opera, and has been involved in a couple of films that have little to do with cooking per se. “I could fill my entire schedule just with the art shows I’m invited to participate in,” he said one morning, clearly pleased with the development.
The stagiaires who come to elBulli are drawn by Adrià’s creativity. Like everyone else, they refer to him as a genius, an artist, and they spend their six months of indentured servitude hoping that some of the talent that has made him unique will rub off on them. But most of them say they do not want to cook like him. It is a curious truth that although they are thrilled to acquire the techniques and fight to have the opportunity to learn to use the Pacojet or the alginate bath, the great majority of stagiaires have no plans to produce avant-garde cuisine themselves. Sunny is typical. “Nah, I want to go back to basics,” he says one day when he has arrived at the restaurant early so that he can go down to the beach to meditate before the start of mise en place. “Delicious food, beautiful ingredients, made with love.” Begoña, from Bilbao, echoes his words, albeit in a different cultural context. “A good stew, a creamy rice” is how she describes what she wants to cook. “Food you eat with a spoon.” There are exceptions—Luke adores the most conceptual of Spanish cuisine, and Nico is always jotting down ideas in his notebook for cocktails that separate into layers before the diner’s eyes—but asked about their own style, most of the stagiaires work in the words “good,” “product,” and “love.”
What is interesting is that they see it as a choice, an either/or, between the avant-garde and something more nurturing and delicious. In other words, they unwittingly subscribe to the dichotomy laid out by Santamaria. Yet, as many elBulli alumni have discovered, a chef need not choose. Having come through elBulli, Andoni Luis Aduriz, René Redzepi, Paco Morales, and Nuno Mendes have all chosen to weight the balance a little more toward the product, but they also judiciously use modern, “molecular” techniques to heighten flavors. Their food is less self-consciously artistic than Adrià’s, and because all of these chefs maintain gardens and forage for wild ingredients, it tracks closely with the locavore movement. But a foam here, a frozen sand there, “dirt” made from ground burned hazelnuts—all owe a profound debt to elBulli. Theirs is, in other words, a third way.
Some of the stagiaires don’t seem to realize that they don’t have to choose between one and the other. “I’m interested in learning about molecular gastronomy,” says Emma. “But it’s not me. I want to really cook.” “Really” cook. What does that mean? Is it not “really” cooking if it involves a distillatory or a centrifuge? If it includes hydrocolloids or sulfites? If it requires you “only” to put some well-grown vegetables on a plate? Yet however much they may reject Ferran’s approach to cuisine, the stagiaires have nonetheless internalized the ethos that drives it. Like the young women who accept without question the gains in employment and opportunities that feminism has brokered but reject the moniker “feminist,” they expect their food not only to make others happy but to say something about themselves. They see cooking, in other words, as a form of self-expression equal to writing poetry or painting sunsets. Even if they are loath to call it by that name, they have come to see cooking as art.