Modern Muse: Ferran AdriÀ

You’ve Never Had These Carrots

Ferran Adrià is one of the world’s most acclaimed chefs. He owned elBulli on Spain’s hilly Catalonian coast which, for several years, was rated the number one restaurant in the world by the critics at Michelin. It was near impossible to get a reservation, but for the lucky few who did, elBulli was much more than a great meal; it was a spectacle.

Adrià is the godfather of molecular gastronomy, a term he despises, but a style of cooking he pioneered. Practitioners of this modernist approach to cooking use the tricks of chemistry to alter the way we experience food. You’ve likely heard of foams—sauces pumped with air until they become so light they disappear in your mouth leaving only the purest taste of what had been foamed. But there’s more: fish can become cotton candy; ravioli bursts in your mouth—but only when a certain note from a certain song is hit; balloons pop and turn into taffy.

I admit, I’m a fan of these food fireworks—so different from the simple, well-cooked peasant food of my mom’s kitchen. This isn’t dinner; it’s theatre. It’s head-spinning stuff—but it’s not just showing off. There’s a point to it all.

I was lucky enough to attend an event with Ferran Adrià at the New York Public Library a few years back. It was an august gathering of the good and the great in the culinary world—there was Lidia Bastianich, there were the top food critics, and there was me, ready to mop up Adrià’s magic the way other guys might fawn for LeBron James. Adria talked—and talked for what felt like a long time. His English wasn’t very good, so much of what he said had to be repeated through a translator. He talked about his favorite topics: creativity, science, the laws of food and eating, why he insists on calling his kitchen a laboratory. But honestly, it all felt very esoteric until the question-and-answer period when some punter worked up the courage to ask Adrià a very simple question, the one on the minds of most people who encounter his alchemical culinary creations: “Why? Why all the hoopla, Ferran? Can’t you just take a few high-quality ingredients and cook them beautifully? Why be so strange?”

Adrià no doubt had his answer ready, and relied upon the translator less than before. He said something like: “Thank you for that question, sir. I start from a belief, the belief that every single carrot in the world is different. Every carrot tastes different, even if only in small and subtle ways. It must. It’s grown in a different bit of soil, watered with different drops of rain and water and fed a different angle of sunlight. No two carrots are exactly the same. But if I give you a carrot that looks like the carrot you had yesterday and looks like the carrot you had the day before and like all the carrots you had as a young boy, you will never stop and say, ‘Holy shit, I have never had this carrot.’ You will not feel the difference. When you eat that carrot for the very first time, you should taste it as if you’re tasting it for the very first time.”

That’s Ferran Adrià’s genius, I believe. He transforms the ordinary, the yesterday, the has-been thing into the most fresh and wonderful thing you can imagine. And he does it by breaking the rules. For Ferran Adrià, disorientation is a strategy, a strategy to blow minds wide open.