Inside the Ultimate Test Kitchen with El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 20, 2012 9:05PM
The world's most celebrated chef is a shape-shifter.
Catch Ferran Adrià demonstrating a new "vanishing ravioli" to the staff at el Bulli and you would swear he is a magician. Observe him prowling the perimeter of the laboratory where his team tests new ingredients and techniques, holding the cell phone at bay just long enough to taste a dash of mushroom juice and render verdict with a miniscule hike of an eyebrow, and he seems more of a Steve Jobs-esque CEO hungry only for perfection. Poring over the logistics required for six months of 30-50 course meals, he's a prematurely graying city planner. When he's cracking the whip on the staff who must do extremely complex work at a breakneck pace, there's more than a little ship's captain in him. When this 75-strong army churns out dishes hailed as works of art while Adrià looks checks his interview schedule, he could be mistaken for a second Warhol.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress doesn't tell you much about Adrià the person. There is no recounting of el Bulli's rise to the pinnacle of the culinary world, and little elaboration of his philosophy of "avant garde" cooking. If you want to understand the Adrià's accomplishment in turning a rustic Catalonian spot into the three-Michelin-star-rated pinnacle of the food world, you should probably turn elsewhere. Director Gereon Wetzel decided on a strictly show-don't-tell philosophy for this documentary, and the result is a close but nearly context-free look at Adrià and a handful of chefs going about the process of dazzling the culinary world year in and year out.
This starts in the offseason, when the restaurant is shut down and the creative staff decamped to their cooking laboratory in Barcelona. During half a year of experimentation and research, Adrià's slender, exacting apprentices and creative collaborators, Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch, toil away to explore every permutation imaginable for a given starting point, usually an ingredient. Ferran is into sweet potato? Let's try it spherified, foamed, freeze-dried, cooked in a vacuum, and generally transformed in every way imaginable. This is America's Test Kitchen meets NASA.
When it's time to open the restaurant again, the creative spark is put to these technically-derived base materials and a delicate alchemy performed. The result is not just a new dish, but a wholly new sensory experience, one through which Adrià attempts to communicate ideas and emotion. The only time we see these chefs smile is when an improbable concoction, such as a dish of tangerine sections and olives sitting in a film of olive oil and a few ice cubes introduced table-side, finally, almost mysteriously, comes together.
El Bulli became a mecca for food lovers and reigned at the top of the culinary world for years before closing last year. Its influence is difficult to overstate. Pushing past "molecular gastronomy" into what Alain Devahive called "Techno-emotional cuisine," Adrià captured the world's attention. Grant Achatz has acknowledged as much with the current NEXT menu. If Alinea/NEXT is the Apple of haute cuisine, el Bulli is the Xerox PARC: where aspirations of a generation of cooks were completely reconfigured.
It was late in the film, as Adrià sat guilelessly devouring a delicate artificial flower, that his truest persona was finally apparent. Here was a man who exploited every technique known to science and the culinary arts to share with people an experience the childlike wonder. He is the closest any living person has come to being Willy Wonka.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress plays Saturday April 21 through Thursday April 26 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.