Ferrán Adrià on the cover of Matador
One can be grateful, educated, gifted for civility or one can be chef Hiroyoshi Ishida, which is all of the above but taken to the manga comic extreme. Literal. Read:
“Dear Mr. Ferran and the entire staff of elBulli: in view of his kindness in having offered his precious cuisine to a Japanese chef like me, in his busy schedule...” ... I am publishing a comic for you.
They say at elBulli that imaginative, curious, extravagant gifts of great sentimental or even economic value arrived on numerous occasions. In 25 years there was time for everything. But the book that arrived in 2007 from Japan unsettled the staff. It was a manga comic, and not a single volume made at the request of chef Ishida, from the Mibu restaurant, to give it to elBulli, but an entire edition, a book that was published and sold in Japanese bookstores and was subsequently translated. The tribute was personal and public. An Ishida offering.
“I feel a gratitude that I cannot express in words. I have returned to Japan impressed by his manliness and kindness. During those ten days happened...”.
The book that unsettled elBulli
The anecdote of Ishida's gratitude for the invitation to spend a few days in Cala Montjoi is collected by Matador , a luxury publication that devotes the 188 large-format pages of its latest issue to the figure of Ferran Adrià, chosen by Time magazine as one of the hundred personalities of the 20th century . For two years the magazine worked as a team with Adrià to present the cook's relationships with other fields of culture and society, music, cinema, science, architecture or health.
In the magazine, Adrià pays tribute to Japan with a photographic dossier of his trips to the Japanese country, along with snapshots of dishes inspired by Japanese food. These trips marked the future of elBulli.
The Mibu restaurant in Tokyo and the Kitcho in Kyoto, where he came into contact with kaiseki cuisine and which we visited to trace a gastronomic route of excellence in Japan, underlined Ferran Adrià's idea that food can be an experience that transcends the strictly culinary.
"But so is the most popular cuisine," says Adrià; "which confirms a strange feeling: Eastern cuisine is so foreign to Western knowledge that the most traditional dishes can seem avant-garde, and vice versa."
Images of Japanese markets taken by Adrià
The Mibu is not exactly an izakaya (the classic Japanese tavern) and Ishida is the opposite of a young man dazzled by the stature of the master. The chef has been in the kitchen for more than 40 of his 63 years and runs a Zen restaurant, one of the most exclusive in the world. Only eight people can sit at his only table in two shifts a day as long as they have an invitation or a diner is a member of this peculiar gastronomic society.
Adrià visited the restaurant in 2002 and got along so well with Ishida that they agreed to meet again in the elBulli kitchen. The exchange, from which, according to the Mibu chef, his gastronomy emerged rejuvenated, culminated when in 2003 a team from Japan landed in Cala Montjoi and for a whole week transformed elBulli into a Mibu embassy. You already know the history of manga comics.
“As a person and as a cook, I would like to apologize for all the inconvenience caused. Mr. Ferran, from cook to cook, I trust your understanding”.
From his trips to Japan, Adrià highlights the aura of the markets. “Visiting Japanese markets is one of the most surprising and disturbing experiences a cook can have. In Japan, and in other Asian countries, a new world is discovered: fruits, vegetables, fish, molluscs, crustaceans, meat, spices, herbs, mushrooms... All families of products seem to have undergone a mutation”.
Shabu-shabu of octopuses
In a conversation with his brother, Albert Adrià summarizes elBulli's creative approach in one sentence: “ Everything that has been done up to now with an omelette is worthless , therefore I have no references and I have to reinvent myself”.
Ferran Adrià, whose immediate future passes through elBullifoundation and the elBulli museum and who has lifted the weight of preparing 140 dishes every night, adds, more sardonically: “ The miniskirt was invented by Mary Quant, right? Lie! It wasn't Mary Quant, no, it was the Romans who already wore the miniskirt. Mary Quant conceptualized it on that basis. Everything exists, the most important thing is to see it”.
Both Ishida and Adrià had no qualms about exchanging miniskirts. Talent issue. and education.
Matador Ñ . Ferran Adrià (€70. iPad and tablet version: €8.99. Editorial La Fábrica).