Book Excerpt: Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food

While his celebrity-chef peers slap their names on frozen pizza and Las Vegas chow halls, Ferran Adrià is taking the high road—to Harvard

Finlay Mackay/Jed Root

By Colman Andrews

When Ferran Adrià—who has been called the world's greatest chef by enough people that it might be true—appears at a gastronomic conference at Harvard University on Sept. 8, it will be as a "brand ambassador" for his native Spain. The Spanish government earmarked €9 million in 2009 (then about $13 million) to promote gastronomic tourism and indigenous food products internationally, and the Spanish tourist office, Turespaña, estimates that more than 10 percent of the 52 million tourists who visited Spain last year were drawn by its food and wine. Thus it's sending Adrià—whose legendary El Bulli restaurant in Cala Montjoi, not quite 100 miles north of Barcelona on the Costa Brava, is open only six months a year, costs about $340 per person, not including wine, and is all but impossible to get into—around the world promoting a simple message: If you like to eat and drink, come to Spain.

The night before the conference, Adrià, 48, will take part in a program called "Science and Cooking: A Dialogue," held in conjunction with Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. This is the first in a semester-long series of seminars and classroom demonstrations in which top contemporary Spanish and American chefs and assorted academics, mostly from the fields of chemistry and physics, will come together at Harvard to discuss and illuminate topics ranging from "Olive Oil & Viscosity" to "Heat, Temperature & Chocolate." The point is to combine the rigor of science with the unfettered creativity of contemporary cuisine—theoretically to the benefit of both disciplines.

The series is part of a much larger, multifaceted Harvard-based collaboration, conceived and directed by Adrià, who, though he has no scientific training of any kind, has revolutionized modern cooking through the development of widely copied "scientific" techniques like spherification (which encloses food essences inside bubbles made of themselves, like a pea ravioli in which both filling and "pasta" are made of nothing but peas) and the production of culinary foams and airs. Most of his innovations came about through trial and error. (In an early foam attempt, he blew pressurized oxygen directly into a ripe tomato and ended up splattering the walls.) Now he seeks to understand the physical and chemical principles on which his art is based, and to share that understanding with his colleagues.

It's unconventional territory for a chef, though not for Adrià, who has spent much of the past decade redefining what the title means. In 2003 he co-founded the Alícia Foundation, a food-related research and educational institution jointly sponsored by the Catalan government and Caixa Manresa, a large regional savings bank. He helps run it along with Catalan-born cardiologist Valentín Fuster, ex-president of the American Heart Assn. and now director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York. Adrià won the 2006 Raymond Loewy Foundation's Lucky Strike Designer Award, which typically goes to design-world luminaries such as Philippe Starck and Karl Lagerfeld, and participated as a conceptual artist in the 2007 edition of Documenta, a large international art show held every five years in Kassel, Germany. And early this year he announced he will soon become a chef without a restaurant: El Bulli will close at the end of the 2011 season, reopening two years later as a "think tank" (he uses the term in English, a language he doesn't really speak) which he says will be "open to...all avant-garde gastronomy lovers: chefs, sommeliers, front-of-the-house professionals, gourmets, creative thinkers, or solely enthusiasts of our dream."

Like many chefs who have become world famous in recent years—Wolfgang Puck, Mario Batali, Alain Ducasse, Alice Waters, and Gordon Ramsay, to name a few—Adrià doesn't merely prepare food. He's an author, endorser, consultant for major corporations, and, though less than most, a TV talking head. More than any of his peers, though, Adrià has invested the proceeds of his celebrity in the creation of new ideas about food. The Harvard collaboration is not a new direction—it's the continuation of a career spent in rigorous pursuit of innovation. A good deal of the work goes on not in the kitchen at El Bulli but in a Barcelona workshop, where the art and science of Ferran Adrià undergo constant reinvention.

In the late 1980s, when entire evenings would pass without a single diner walking into El Bulli, a friend of Adrià's asked him why he stayed in such a remote spot. "Because I have an idea," the chef replied. "And it's a good idea."

A decade later, with the dining room packed every night, Adrià put resources behind his idea. He purchased an entire floor of an 18th century townhouse on the Carrer de la Portaferrissa, a clamorous pedestrian shopping street linking Barcelona's medieval Gothic Quarter with its famous Las Ramblas in the city's heart. The process of designing, renovating, and equipping it took more than a year, and the elBulli Taller opened in January 2000. (The word, pronounced "tal-YEH," is Catalan for "studio" or "workshop," like atelier in French.) Together, El Bulli and the workshop lose more than half a million euros a year, a deficit made up by Adrià's other ventures.

Throughout 2009, I spent a number of mornings and afternoons at the Taller, asking questions, watching the chefs work, and snooping around (with Adrià's permission). On my second or third visit it dawned on me that, for a real chef, working at the Taller is a dream job: Adrià's deputies come in every day to play with food. Everything is fair game, every culture, every ingredient, every technology.

It's not all play, of course. Chefs are required to keep extensive and detailed records of everything they do, the failures as well as the successes—on paper and with digital cameras. They also take careful notes when they're out and about, traveling abroad or just roaming around Barcelona or the Catalan countryside. Back at the Taller, all the notes are transferred to a large master notebook and used as a nondigital database of ideas. Another notebook catalogues the results of extensive testing for dishes are being seriously considered. Each one gets its own page, with name and principal product, date of testing, valoración (positive or negative), description/elaboration, field (new product, technique, technique applied to product), and ideas for usage (as dessert, as cocktail, integrated into a dish).

The Taller functions when El Bulli is closed, traditionally from October to April, with a team of about a dozen chefs working in morning and afternoon shifts; Ferran once estimated that about 5,000 experiments might be conducted here annually. Out of that, perhaps 100 or so new dishes would make it into the restaurant. In the mid-2000s, an independent marketing study estimated that running the Taller costs about €250,000 a year. More recently Adrià has said that the Taller and the restaurant run an annual deficit of €500,000 annually, adding that "without the Taller, El Bulli as it is today would not be possible." He adds, "What's important is that we do this every day, every day."

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