To say, as people everywhere have been doing for quite a while, that Ferran Adrià is the world's greatest chef, is to miss the point. Or to fall short of it, at any rate. A chef is someone who cooks for a living. Adrià does not cook for a living. If he did, he would starve. For his restaurant, the most imaginative generator of haute cuisine on the planet, runs at a loss, and has done so for six years.
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Adrià, born in Barcelona 44 years ago, is a cook. But, if you deconstruct him the way he deconstructs food, you discover that he is also an artist, a scientist, an inventor, a stage director, a designer, a philosopher, an anarchist and, to a degree that some of his more solemn admirers maybe fail to grasp, Coco the Clown.
Deconstruction is one of the Adrià inventions that have changed the face of gastronomy. To understand how it works, let's look at what he does with a classic dish of his native land, tortilla española - Spanish omelette. First, he reduces the old-fashioned tortilla to its three component parts: eggs, potatoes and onions. Then he cooks each separately. The finished product, the deconstructed outcome, is one-part potato foam (food-foaming is another technique Adrià has given the world), one-part onion purée, one-part egg-white sabayon. One isolated component is served on top of the other in layers, and topped with crumbs of deep-fried potatoes. The dish, minuscule, comes inside a sherry glass. Adrià, with the playful irony that exists in practically everything he does, names this dish...tortilla española.
He will apply the same technique to a multiplicity of classic dishes, such as gazpacho, chicken curry and tiramisu. The fun of the thing, the ability fully to appreciate the new concoctions, depends on the diner being familiar with the original dish. Adrià's objective is that the diner, drawing on the palate's memory banks, will nod in delighted recognition of the alchemy he has wrought.
In an encyclopedia-sized tome called El Bulli 1994-1997, he talks about his philosophy of food more extensively than in previous and subsequent volumes. (The book is part of a series of Adrià greatest hits, or rather greatest secrets, that have so far sold 100,000 copies in six languages.) In the 1994-1997 edition he defines deconstruction in the following way: 'Taking a dish that is well known and transforming all its ingredients, or part of them; then modifying the dish's texture, form and/or its temperature. Deconstructed, such a dish will preserve its essence... but its appearance will be radically different from the original's.'
You have, right there, as good a definition of Ferran Adrià himself as you will find. He is a three-star Michelin chef. But what he has done is to deconstruct that familiar personage, tease out his component parts, and then repackage him, while still retaining his essential identity. I have eaten at Racó de Can Fabes, ranked 11th in the Restaurant magazine list that this year named El Bulli the best restaurant in the world. The chef at Can Fabes, Santi Santamaria, has three restaurants and a total of six Michelin stars. The boy is good. But Adrià is something else altogether. It is not that he is in a different league; that he is better or worse. Any more than Adrià's tortilla española is any better to eat than the tortilla my Spanish mother makes. It is just that Adrià is fundamentally different from the legion of celebrated chefs ('the best on the planet', says Joel Robuchon; 'the most exciting', says Paul Bocuse) who admire him. Santi Santamaria will offer on his menu rack of lamb, and the dish you will receive will quite possibly turn out to be the best of its kind you'll ever taste. At El Bulli you won't eat rack of lamb - or anything recognisable as such. What you will eat is something like the 30-dish package I consumed the one time I went there in 1998. I had, among other things, pistachios and ice-cream and consommé and raviolis. That was how the menu described them, but when they arrived - each a little painted sculpture - it turned out that the pistachios came in the form of a sherbet lolly; the ice-cream was parmesan, sandwiched in parmesan wafers; the consommé consisted of three parts: transparent but richly tasty tomato water, bright red watermelon cubes and little green balls of basil foam; the raviolis looked like raviolis but were made not with pasta but with calamari meat and when you bit into them a warm gel of coconut, mint and ginger oozed onto your tongue, around the inner lining of your cheeks and down your throat. (This dish was conceived in the Clinton era and wags in Adrià's kitchen unofficially christened it 'Raviolis Lewinsky'.)
Other things I remember from El Bulli are the beauty of the setting, perched over a cove in one of the remoter corners of the Catalan Mediterranean, near the French border; the space-age kitchen, open to view, where 30 staff members toiled with silently oriental dedication; the plates and cutlery and glasses were unlike anything I'd ever seen before, thoughtfully contrived to fit the particular dish that they accompanied; and the surreal 'drinks': a piña colada was coconut foam, dehydrated pineapple and a sort of rum gel - served on one spoon. I also remember that during the entire three and a half hours the meal lasted the four of us at my table talked only of the food mostly in corblimeys, oooh's and aaaah's. It being virtually impossible these days to get a table at El Bulli, people all over the world are always asking me what it was like. I always give the same answer. That if what you are after is some honest-to-goodness grub, a barbecued burger in the garden might do just as well. But this was much more than eating. This was Gaudí's architecture brought to the kitchen. This was the culinary equivalent of the Cirque du Soleil, complete with acrobats, magicians and clowns.
Ask Adrià and he will agree that a piece of plain fish, freshly caught and grilled to perfection can be as pleasing to taste as the elaborate invention of the cleverest chef. 'Eating well is something you can do at home. The point about what we offer is that it is more than eating; it is an experience,' says Adrià, who in one of his books has defined eating at El Bulli as a night out at the theatre. 'What's radical about us rests not on what we serve, but on how and where. In the West, where the problem of hunger has been solved, where obesity is now the issue, the trend has to be more and more about the pleasure of eating, the fun, rather than seeing it as simply a way of satisfying our appetites. At El Bulli we try and take this idea to the nth degree.'
And he has definitely succeeded. Adrià's restaurant, which seats 50, opens only April to September and only at nights, is booked through to 2008. For every table that is available, there are 400 requests. Over 800,000 people call or email for a table each season. And yet, in the most surprising moment of the two hours that we spend together talking at his laboratory in Barcelona, he tells me that he makes no money out of El Bulli. No money? 'No. And,what's more, we don't want to. We really don't want to.'
Does he mean that the restaurant has never made money? 'For two years, from 1998 to 2000, we did...I think. But since we decided to close for lunch, nothing. And yet, yes, the requests we receive for tables - it's madness! There's no end to it. So, sure, there is an obvious capitalist solution: raise the prices. We could do so perfectly easily and make four, five million euros profit a year.' Dinner at El Bulli, which means the dégustation menu - there is no à la carte - costs, complete with wine, �?50 per head. 'I went to a restaurant in New York recently where I paid $800 just for myself,' says Adrià, letting me know with a shrug that the price was shockingly excessive. 'Now, people fly in from all over the world to eat at El Bulli. Quite often they stay at a suite at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. That costs �?,000 a night. Someone who is willing to pay that is not going to balk if I ask him for �?,500 for a night at El Bulli. He'll pay up, no problem. And I know that at that price I could fill up every table.' The place where we are talking, he calls his workshop; others, detecting the mad professor in him, call it his laboratory. Yet again - as with Adrià's reconstructed dishes, as with Adrià himself, what you see is not what you get. The façade of the ancient building where the workshop is located, on a narrow street off Barcelona's Ramblas is dirty grey, suggesting at a certain olde-worlde grubbiness inside. The door at street level is big, heavy and wooden. You open it and enter a dark patio, at the end of which there is a lift. You go up to the first floor and emerge into another dark passage. But when you pass through the door marked 'El Bulli Taller' (El Bulli workshop), you take a step forward in time, from the 18th century into the 21st. It is like a state-of-the-art architect's studio inside: a duplex, with white floors and white walls, and clean, angular, well-lit spaces; books, files and CDs of experiments and recipes, accumulated over the past 18 years, from the El Bulli team, impeccably ordered ('to be anarchic, you have to be organised', says Adrià); white leather sofas arranged around a flat-screen TV; a row of laptops rest on a sleek wooden desk and a general air of hushed efficiency pervades. On the walls, Adrià's face looks out from framed covers of the New York Times and Le Monde magazines. Another cover, this time from Time magazine, describes him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The headline on the New York Times reads, 'How Spain became the new France'. Le Monde merely bears testimony to the fact that if the French are ready to acknowledge it, then Adrià really must be the greatest.
Adrià's right-hand man, Oriol Castro, has shed his chef's robes and is tapping away at a computer, putting down his preliminary thoughts for next year's El Bulli menu, which will be in every respect different from this year's. 'If not,' says Adrià, as he shows me around, 'why bother?' On a big piece of paper on a wall alongside Castro's desk are arranged the first embryonic ideas for next season under headings that read 'fries', 'eggs', 'ice creams', 'tempuras', 'mousses' and 'cocktails'. I remember suddenly the first time I visited the lab, a couple of years ago, when I was sitting with Adrià in the building's small converted chapel where he always meets his visitors and he was called out by one of his assistant chefs. I followed him out to the sterile, odourless kitchen, full of tiny gadgets and silver apparatuses, where Castro, who was then sporting his chef whites, invited him to sample one of the possible creations for the ensuing season. It was a white foam with a sprinkling of what looked like lemon powder and came inside a small glass vessel the size of an egg cup. As the rest of us looked on expectantly, Adrià dipped a small spoon in the foam, put it to his mouth, licked his lips, nodded, put the spoon down, said, 'Yes, put that on the menu', and in one movement he turned back towards the little chapel to resume our conversation. Once we had sat down again, I asked him what it was he had tasted. Without batting an eyelid, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he replied, 'a gin and tonic'.
No one's ever done stuff like this, no one has ever applied the same daring imagination to food, yet Adrià himself is a most unprepossessing individual, who - when he is not working, which is not often - leads a strikingly ordinary life. He is middle-aged, middle height, of middling hair-density, with a slight paunch. If it were not for the fact that he dresses in black from top to toe, like his waiters, he would be the bloke at the bar, mistakeable for a million others, in Anywhere Spain. He has preserved, to his immense credit, something of that everyday Spanishness at El Bulli, for all its cutting-edge sophistication. I have a friend who went there once with his wife and nine-month-old baby. He thought the maître d' would start in horror on seeing the infant. The maître d' did as all Spanish maître d's do; he smiled, he cooed and he conjured out of nowhere a baby's highchair.
Adrià is married but has no children of his own, a large reason why he is able to work 15 hours a day, 330 days a year. But in material terms, he insists he is a regular guy: 'I am not a multimillionaire. I don't own a yacht or a Ferrari. I live in a 60-square- metre flat. My needs are simple. In fact, I bet my day-to-day costs are lower than yours.'
Maybe, but his overall income far exceeds mine. El Bulli itself may not make money, but the brand has spawned plenty of other things that do. Those 100,000 big books that he has sold containing the Bulli secrets, going back to when Adrià first joined the restaurant in 1983 cost £100 each and are printed by El Bulli's very own publishing house. Then there's his range of supermarket books (50 new tapas you can make at home, 10-minute recipes, that sort of thing); a hotel in Andalucía; three fast-food outlets called Fast Good (two in Madrid, one in Santiago, Chile), with four more on the way; and his endorsement of a top-selling brand of olive oil. He charges many thousands for each lecture he gives. He has a collection of kitchenwear, a joint venture with Armand Basi. He has his own brand of plates and cutlery (including a spoon with small holes in it so you can eat your cereal without drinking the milk).He has deals with Lavazza coffee, Pepsi, United Biscuits and Spain's biggest hotel chain. One could go on but he is, in short, the David Beckham of the food business.
Though, like Beckham, he is the first to say that he couldn't have done it without the lads. Half the time that we talk, at least, he speaks in the third person plural, by which he means not the royal 'we' but the galactico team around him. 'I have the best team in the world,' he says. It's a team of five including his genius younger brother, Albert, El Bulli's indispensable man. 'He is, for me, one of the best five creative chefs in the world, and the very best food analyst there is. He stays cool, he keeps me in check. He is vital for me.' There is also Oriol Castro, Adrià's number two at El Bulli and the brain behind many of El Bulli's dishes: 'There are not five chefs in Spain who are better than Oriol.' And finally there are Marc Cuspinera and Eduard Bosch: 'The two previous heads of kitchen at El Bulli and they are now the ones in charge of my businesses. Both of them quite brilliant.'
Adrià says that each one of his famous five could head up one of the best restaurants in Spain. They work almost telepathically, travelling together all over the world during the six months of febrile creativity when El Bulli shuts, sitting down at restaurants in San Francisco, Bangkok, Tokyo, Shanghai - sometimes a dozen different sittings a day - gathering ideas, coming up with new ones and, as Adrià says, 'working, working all the time, drinking nothing but water'.
'To have such a collection of talent is absolutely abnormal in this business. We have the best team in the world and the reason I can say this, in all confidence, is that it is measurable. Tell me what new ideas there have been in the world in the last decade and then look at what we have come up with here.'
Adrià sings his team's praises but somehow manages not to sound arrogant. He does not even sound boastful. During the couple of hours we spend together he conveys relentless enthusiasm, tripping over his words continually as he speaks, his thoughts rushing out faster than his mouth can process them. He is perspicacious and funny, serious and self-deprecating. But he does not underestimate his importance. He has a quality you find in the truly great, whether their field be food, sport, art or politics. They know, beyond vanity, that they are the best. Adrià is viewed by his peers as a man unusually generous in sharing out his knowledge. That is why more top-level chefs on sabbatical go to his restaurant than any other restaurant in the world: that is why those same chefs will concede that 90 per cent of the truly innovative ideas to have emerged in cooking since El Bulli seriously took off in the mid-Nineties have come from Adrià and his team.
'Summarising what we do, I'd say it is this: whereas before the objective was to create new dishes, now what we seek is to create techniques and concepts that will generate many dishes. Whether you like what we do or not, and some might think it's crap, the fact is that this is El Bulli; this is what we do, and where we have been pioneers.' Are there some techniques he might like to highlight? 'Well, there are the foams, of course,' he says, mentioning a phenomenon that has launched the sale of thousands of soda siphons, which he uses to create airy essences of all kinds, from broad beans, to almonds, to coconuts, to green peas, to gin and tonics. 'The deconstruction style has been very important, too. Also, bringing the idea to haute cuisine of ice creams that are not sweet, but salty - instead of vanilla, cheese. Also, I especially enjoyed the creation of warm gelatine. We developed this with the help of scientists, because to make gelatine that is warm seemed impossible at first.
'I could go on and on, but maybe what makes me most proud is that we have generated enthusiasm and excitement among thousands and thousands of people the world over. When I go to Brazil and I see a young chef who has been inspired by us, who has copied what we do and seeks to build on that, developing his own ideas... that is just the best feeling! For me to go to a restaurant and eat something that is not only good, but totally new, is a double thrill. Double the enjoyment.' One restaurant where he says he experiences this thrill more than any other is the Fat Duck, whose chef Heston Blumenthal Adrià describes to me as his 'best friend' in the business, outside his immediate Bulli circle. Adrià does not speak English and Blumenthal does not speak Spanish but, Adrià says, the two have an understanding that goes beyond words. 'He is honest in what he does,' Adrià says, 'and I like and admire him for that.' And because Adrià sees in the brilliant young Blumenthal a kindred spirit - a disciple who has grown to become more than just a chef, but a revolutionary inventor.
What has been the spur behind Adrià's genius? The answer is crassly Freudian. It is sex. Sex was what drove him, aged 18, to get a job in a regular everyday restaurant in Castelldefels, on the coast just south of Barcelona. Initially he bore the title of junior assistant cook, a grand way of saying 'dishwasher'. But he didn't care. He had no more interest in cooking at the time than he had in gardening or bricklaying. The point was to make enough cash to spend a whole summer in Ibiza, which meant meeting girls.
He remained in Castelldefels a little longer than he had expected, (the girls were very friendly) gradually learning to cook what he calls 'basic stuff like tournedos Rossini, paella, that sort of thing'. He also began memorising a classic French cookbook, 500 pages long. A year later he made it to Ibiza. When he returned to Barcelona, he drifted from one restaurant to another and then did his military service. He worked in the kitchens, serving 3,000 conscripts until he got his big break, a job as chef to the admiral in the Mediterranean port town of Cartagena. He became head of the kitchen, leading a team of five, and suddenly found himself making meals for cabinet ministers and, on one occasion, even the King of Spain. Until that point he had no special affection for cooking. The notion that he might dedicate the rest of his life to this business still seemed far-fetched. But now the bug bit. He read voraciously about nouvelle cuisine and then, following a chance encounter, he got a job as an intern for a month at El Bulli, already a very respectable restaurant indeed - one of two Michelin two-stars (there were no three-stars then) in Spain. The decisive final steps came, first, in 1985 when he sat for a month at the feet of the head chef Georges Blanc at the magnificent Pic restaurant in Valence, France, and, second, a year later when he attended a course in Cannes given by Jacques Maximin. 'There was one thing Maximin said to us that has always stayed with me,' Adrià told me once. 'Someone asked him, what is creativity? And he replied, "Creativity is not copying". So simple and so obvious, I suppose, yet that was a key moment for me. Because until then I had always copied, but from that moment on everything changed. I understood something I had never understood before. I passed from being a technician to a creator.'
The rest is history. In 1997 he got his third Michelin star, and since then, every other food award there is. Lately he has begun to venture into new terrain, uncharted for anyone in the world of cuisine.
Last month he received one of the world's top designer prizes. Previous winners of the Raymond Loewy Foundation's Lucky Strike award have included Karl Lagerfeld, Donna Karan and Philippe Starck. He received the award in Berlin in November, soon after being informed that he had been selected to participate in next year's Documenta contemporary art exhibition, a sort of art-world Olympics. Sometimes described as the Hundred Day Museum (Picasso and Kandinsky were the stars of the first Documenta, in 1955), Documenta happens every five years in Kassel, Germany. 'I've been asked to come up with the iconic centrepiece of the show and, while incredibly flattered, and while never in my wildest dreams imagining that something like this would happen to me, I have to say that I am freaking out about it,' Adrià confesses.
'I feel like an intruder. Artists all over battle all their lives to receive an invitation to display their work at Documenta and now I, a cook, am asked to go along! So I worry. It's not going to be a dinner I am going to make and - while I do have some ideas - I am not sure yet quite what I am going to do. I have met the organiser Roger Buergel who believes that to create a new cooking technique is as complicated and challenging as painting a great picture. He says that he sees the work we do as a new artistic discipline. He says that our work shows cuisine should be a new art form. I am thrilled and honoured to be given the chance to attempt this leap.'
Will others take the leap with him? What does he see as the future of food? He divides his answer into two. As far as everyday eating is concerned he says he sees a trend, or at any rate wishes to see a trend, that follows the example of Jamie Oliver, whom Adrià does not know but whose work in trying to improve school dinners Adrià tells me he admires enormously.
'And he really is a multimillionaire and has no need to do that, which gives that moral commitment of his even more merit.' In the home, too, Adrià adds, he wants to believe that people will begin to see that for the same price as a double cheeseburger 'you can buy fresh fish for two'.
In this case, Adrià himself leads by example. At the office he might come up with the most complex concoctions in the history of gastronomy, but back home he eats a piece of grilled fish and veg, perhaps with a few slices of jamón, like everybody else in largely still healthy (compared to Britain, at any rate) Mediterranean-diet Spain.
As for haute cuisine, he feels that the creative energy and artistic inspiration will come increasingly from the East. 'The impact of Oriental on Western food has barely hit 50 per cent of what it might be. Chinese food, save for what you find in a few London restaurants, does not come close to what you get in China itself. Japan has so many concepts still to offer us, especially in their spiritual relationship with food. But it's China, in particular, that excites me. China, with its millenial gastronomic tradition, with its minute attention to the health value of each dish, terrain of which we've barely scratched the surface.
'But Brazil is exciting too, because of the creativity of its people and because of the tremendous, gastronomically untapped orchard of the Amazon basin. In Argentina people are also incredibly creative and are held back from being a major force only by the country's economic problems. I am excited too by the Maghreb, by the Islamic world, by the potential we may find, drawing from an entirely different tradition, in a daring young chef from Marrakech.'
Beyond ego, beyond those layers - artist, scientist, stage director, designer, philosopher, anarchist, revolutionary, comedian and accidental businessman - that make up Adrià's component parts there burns a passionate curiosity, a childlike enthusiasm. That is his fuel, as it is with all true geniuses. But unlike many geniuses (such as two fellow Spaniards to whom he is often compared, Picasso and Dalí) he is a nice guy, surprisingly unassuming and as generous towards others as he is towards his life's work. His big challenge, he says, has been to 'keep myself honest'. He has risen to it. He has beaten the twin impostors wealth and fame, as he has continued relentlessly to pursue his mission, which he himself with deconstructed simplicity defines as 'the art of giving pleasure through food'.
El Bulli, Cala Montjoi, Ap. 30 17480, Girona, Spain. 00 34 972 150 457; fax 00 34 972 150 717;
e-mail: [email protected]; www.elbulli.com. The restaurant is already fully booked for the 2007 season.
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