Ferran Adriu looks tired and distracted. He’s milling around Washington’s Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert, waiting for his friend and former acolyte Jose Andres to arrive, so we can start our interview.
Adriu’s dress is casual, almost thrown together: a gray T-shirt and black jacket that match his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. He has a paunch that protrudes from his jacket, a professional hazard.
The 49-year-old master of modernist cooking is also using the opportunity to promote his latest cookbook. “The Family Meal” is a collection of three-course menus that Adriu and his team created to feed the staff at El Bulli, his gastronomic Mecca in Roses, Spain, which recently told its devoted followers to seek thrills elsewhere. The restaurant closed in July.
But more than that, Adriu is here to help sell his vision of El Bulli Foundation, his forthcoming think tank and research facility, where the chef will continue to push the boundaries of cooking and perhaps groom the next generation’s Ferran Adriu.
At this very moment, however, I get the feeling that Adriu’s most immediate vision involves an afternoon nap rather than trying to explain himself one more time to yet another journalist who has never made the pilgrimage to Roses.
Away from the cocoons of his kitchen and lab, Adriu adopts a public persona that has left more than one interviewer puzzled. He describes his avant-garde cuisine (“cocina de vanguardia“) as a “language” and notes that he strives to tell a story with his long, multi- dish tasting menus that could incorporate everything from freeze- dried foams to olive oil cylinders.
He acknowledges that people “tell us the cooking we do is pretentious, and sometimes you cannot argue,” but then performs an oral pirouette and wonders, somewhat pointedly, “But for whom is it pretentious?”
Mostly, though, Adriu worries that he has “not been good enough in explaining myself and explaining what El Bulli’s all about.”
Perhaps his pain is the kind unique to the pioneer. Avant- garde cooking such as Adriu’s is sort of like space exploration: It fascinates a great many people, thanks not only to its groundbreaking discoveries but also to the tools and equipment used to find them.
At the same time, avant-garde cooking annoys many, who find its inflated costs unjustified and its aims unfocused. Isn’t cooking, after all, meant merely to satisfy a primal urge: namely, hunger?
Adriu sometimes seems as if he cannot, or has yet to, reconcile those two perspectives on his career. To use one somewhat startling example: Adriu’s cooking philosophy at El Bulli has been inspired almost exclusively by a remark that French chef Jacques Maximin made in the late 1980s.
“Creativity means not copying” is a mantra Adriu has repeatedly invoked to justify his aims and even the short season of his restaurant, which would open for just six months a year. But in a recent Q&A with , when confronted with how often he uses the word “creativity,” Adriu acted almost embarrassed. “It’s a pretentious, horrible word, man,” the chef said.
Across a mostly empty table inside a mostly empty dining room at Westend Bistro, I ask Adriu point-blank whether he decided to close El Bulli because he could no longer live up to Maximin’s definition of creativity. Perhaps he had started copying himself?
“Not exactly,” Adriu says through his interpreter. “But I could have gotten to that point. I decided to change the situation before I reached that point . . . It wasn’t so much about the dishes but the dining experience. I felt that we reached a limit as far as a dining experience. We couldn’t give people more dishes. Not just physically but psychologically, people couldn’t absorb so much. You couldn’t absorb more than 45 dishes” in one sitting.
How El Bulli Foundation will continue Adriu’s traditions, and whether it will prepare meals for public consumption, have been subjects of some debate in the media. That might be a function of Adriu’s own open-mindedness about the project.
When I wonder aloud about the foundation’s mission, Adriu explains that it won’t be “too different from what we’ve been doing up to now.” He describes the mission as, simply, to “create and show.” The latter term is somewhat ambiguous and apparently means the foundation will show off most of its work online, where chefs around the world can draw cutting-edge inspiration.
But as he did with cuisine and cooking, Adriu also wants to blow up preconceived notions about being a chef.
“Chefs have only been able to work in restaurants, high-end cuisine. Why? Why haven’t they been able to find other scenarios? For those chefs who want to do avant-garde cuisine, should they be finding their income in a restaurant?” Adriu says. “These are the kind of questions we are asking ourselves. So the new scenario will allow them to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it.”
As arch and theoretical as that sounds, it’s firmly rooted in practical matters, Adriu says. El Bulli’s full-time staffers, for instance, have grown older and have started families; they wanted a more stable life away from the late-night, high-anxiety, hard-drinking world of restaurant kitchens. But Adriu also saw other problems starting to bubble up.
“If we hadn’t created the foundation, we wouldn’t have been able to continue. As a restaurant, as the existing model, we would have probably lasted another couple of years,” he says. “The system couldn’t stand El Bulli’s success . . . So we had to find a scenario that was acceptable to most people, which allowed them to continue to do what they like doing, which was to be creative.”
It’s important to remember when contemplating El Bulli — and the experimental dining rooms that followed it, such as Grant Achatz’s Alinea, Rene Redzepi’s Noma, Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 and Andres’ Minibar — that these kinds of restaurants spin in a rarefied orbit. Their aims are markedly different from those of a more traditional restaurant.
“In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it’s the experience,” Adria says. “That’s the difference.”
