Joanna Pitman talks to Ferran Adrià, widely hailed as the world’s greatest chef and named as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet. He doesn’t think he is Picasso
Can I interest you in some almond ice cream served on a swirl of garlic oil and balsamic vinegar? Are you game for a ‘chicken skin and orange blossom envelope’, fried tobacco balls, or a taste of rabbit brains with pistachio, green tea and demerara sugar? Although many of us would hesitate to put such things in our mouths, these startling dishes have all been created by Ferran Adrià, the 47-year-old Spaniard reputed to be the best chef in the world.
Reactions to Adrià’s work tend to be rich and gamey. Joel Robuchon, the French culinary star, has said he is simply the finest chef on the planet. Time magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. His restaurant, El Bulli, located in a sleepy cove at Cala Montjoi on the Costa Brava, has been voted best restaurant four years running by the Restaurant Magazine. It is open for just six months a year, serves only 30-course dinners, and caters for 8,000 customers each season. Every year, some 300,000 callers request a table.
Two years ago, Adrià moved into a different sphere when he became one of just two Spaniards invited to participate in Documenta, the art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, and one of the biggest and most exclusive events in the international contemporary art calendar. Adrià’s ‘artwork’ was a dinner every night at El Bulli for two people, selected at random during the 100-day run of the exhibition and sent off with airfares and a voucher. A few took fright at the food, but most loved it.
The critics, however, turned up their noses, condemning Adrià’s work as the ‘banalisation of art’, and implying that as a chef, Adrià did not know his place. One critic, José de la Sota, wrote ‘Adrià is not Picasso. Picasso did not know how to cook but he was better than Adrià [at art]. What is art now? Is it something or nothing?’
Adrià’s response appears this week in the form of a book, Food for Thought, Thought for Food, published by Actar and carefully drizzled with high-art credentials, being edited by Richard Hamilton and Vicente Todoli, director of Tate Modern. It was launched at artist Carsten Holler’s violently trendy Double Club in north London, attended by a smooth mix of art and food bigwigs including Nicholas Serota, Antony Gormley and Heston Blumenthal.
Adrià, who looks perfectly ordinary and could easily be mistaken for the local butcher at Montjoi, is delighted and rather astonished at the acclaim he has stirred up. ‘But I am not an artist,’ he tells me. ‘I am a chef. A painter might dream to be Picasso or an architect to be Le Corbusier. My dream was to be a good chef, and now I have been able to achieve a hundred times more than my dream. Life is unexpected,’ he shrugs. ‘When I was first asked to participate in Documenta I was delighted because it is all about creativity, and that is my life. But as I became more involved it became sort of a monster. It became very controversial and people were very angry. A storm blew up over my participation. I realised a book was necessary.’
Hamilton’s prologue sets up Adrià as a sublime culinary artist with a lyrical, poetic sensibility and a genius that lies in developing and refining the language of food. The book works hard and not entirely successfully to convince us that Adrià’s food is a form of art. Liberal reproductions of food-themed artworks (such as an Arcimboldo portrait, Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and photographs of Alison Knowles making a giant salad at Tate Modern in 2008) are interspersed with pages of high end photographs of Adrià’s dishes. There is a timeline of his culinary influences, an evolutionary analysis of El Bulli’s menus and methods and a sort of catalogue raisonné of every dish he has created, all of them dated, archived and numbered with cross references and charts like genealogical trees. In spite of all his creative crackle and fizz, Adrià has a trainspotter’s tendency towards detailed data, perhaps the natural reaction of a man whose artworks have a shorter life expectancy than any other.
With a cartoon on the cover of Adrià by Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame, and heavily sexy photographs of Adrià’s lollipops and exploding taste bombs, the book is lightly, irrefutably spiced with a pinch of the comic.
Adrià’s culinary performances remind one of the youthful exuberance of the Futurists, who along with avant-garde paintings, sculpture and poetry, also produced Futurist cookery: a typical dish consisted of a whole skinned salami served in black coffee and eau de cologne. Their food was a joke, but Adrià’s is deeply serious. ‘Adrià’s food can be shocking. He manages to take ideas a long way. I don’t know if it really is art or not, but it is very cerebral cooking,’ says Hamilton. ‘I remember one dish which was a sort of miracle. It was the colour, the shape and the texture of a green olive, but when you put it in your mouth it exploded with the most delicious, warm sensation. It turned out to be a soft membrane containing olive oil.’
Hamilton is a regular at El Bulli, having first been taken there in the mid-1960s by Marcel Duchamp, before Adrià took up residence. If only Duchamp had had the chance to sample Adrià’s surreal cuisine. Hamilton liked the area, bought a ruin nearby, and has eaten at El Bulli every year since. ‘One year the quality soared when Adrià started experimenting and ever since it has been extraordinary. The food has lyrical beauty. His meals, which last for about three hours, are an extraordinary experience and they seem to relate to art. There is the quality to the staging, the exquisite sensations, smells and flavours and the wonderful performance.’
‘People go to El Bulli for a life-changing gastronomic experience,’ says Todoli. ‘I remember my first meal there, and nothing was ever the same again. Invisible rooms of flavour appeared that I didn’t know existed… Artist or not, he is a creative genius.’
Adrià says he does it to make people happy and to give them something to think about. ‘Every year I invent new dishes. Last year we worked on very light and strongly flavoured mousses, and I did for example, parmesan air with muesli. It was sort of weird but fun. This year I am experimenting with water, making ice diamonds, very crunchy dishes… I want people to enjoy not just the food and its smells and textures and sounds, but the whole experience. I can see it in my customers’ eyes at the end whether they have liked it or not. The eyes do not lie. I hope that they will never forget what they ate at my restaurant.’
Comments