Around the vanguard, right, Ferran?
Short answer to the first question: are dissecting the creative process . Even shorter answer to the second: it will not be a restaurant.
Ferran Adrià welcomes us at the door ; The reason for the meeting is the edition in Spanish, as well as in English and Chinese, of elBulli 2005-2011 , from Phaidon, but it immediately becomes clear that the list of questions and doubts that are written down will fall short. His speech is so complex that it transcends the purely gastronomic; focuses on philosophical questions that seek to dissect, thus, point-blank, How does the human mind work Y how creativity occurs . So much so that it's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the torrent of information.
He is aware of this and uses metaphors to put himself in the place of the visitor while he speaks hurriedly, flies from one topic to another, explains a thousand ideas that bubble in his head, others occur to him during his speech – at one point he launches a “note this, Gaby: Enric Rovira he is such a specialist he is halfway between the cook and the technologist” Gabi, working several meters away, picks up a sheet of paper and writes, leaving unfinished sentences and unfinished concepts, but in the end everything is inspiring and strangely coherent . Which is not to say that it is easy to explain.
Inside the elBulli Foundation
THE WORK OF ELBULLIFOUNDATION
Start the visit showing us two projects that will launch soon . On the one hand, there is a huge digital file , full of sections and subsections elaborated using the Sapiens methodology to create a gastronomic taxonomy very complex and unique in the world . “The big project is this, a creative archive”, says Adrià. On the other hand, the future elBulli1846 , located in the renovated and expanded Cala Montjoi restaurant, in Roses. But it will not be a restaurant but a expolab . I mean, a extreme creativity center where there will be a team dedicated to investigating and improving the efficiency of SMEs or individuals, from all kinds of fields, not exclusively related to gastronomy. Calls will be opened so that interested people or companies can participate, and it will be both an exhibition space and a workplace.
“The new part, the parking lot, you enter and it will be amazing”, Ferran gets excited pointing to the model of the project on the web. “From the parking lot to the building will be the exhibition, between trees . He is doing it elizava school , and it will be a set with elements in the open air, open. For example, when the weather is good, people will be working and other people walking”.
"Very important," he stresses. “The exhibition is not about cooking or about old elBulli. It's about the creative process . This is not elBulli, which does not mean that there are no gastronomic nods. That is why we have taken the architect claudia schneider , on an emotional side, because her father was a friend of Marketa Schilling (original owner of the restaurant) and she has been to elBulli 300 times. This could not be commissioned or Frank Gehry, had to be a person with a connection ”.
“We will make two years of concerted visits, like here, where the bioarchaeologists from Barcelona came yesterday”, ( to access the BulliLab just call and request it ) . "Then it will be visits as if it were a museum, people will pay to enter."
70 people work in perfect silence
Apart from occasional visitors, who are the calls for to form the creative teams that work in elBulli1846 ? Ferran points to Phaidon's books: “Who bought this book? All cooks? No. Our project is a reference in innovation and creativity in all areas . It is that even the coach of the second team of Seville (Lillo), has our creative process as a reference. We will make a hyperfilter , by video, to detect that creative talent of whoever wants to participate. There will be about 30 or 35 people with about 20 or 25 ideas . We don't want to make dishes (we will, but for us) : what we will do is make people think . There will be psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists… dedicated to constantly creating and auditing, analyzing their work. This is tremendous pressure. but this was elBulli ”.
AND WHAT WAS ELBULLI?
"ElBulli were Ferran, Albert, Oriol... thinking more than 300 days a year . On Sunday I was with my wife but it didn't matter; it was but it wasn't. Closing six months or closing at noon (Andoni closes four, Mugaritz too… not the way we do it, but it is done) , that concept of having a time to think, the workshop ... then, none existed, and now in Spain there are about twenty restaurants that do it. The service-kitchen ratio it was elBulli that changed it when the chefs began to bring trays to the dining room. The contracted service was elBulli, it was Juli Soler who created it, a guy who was Groucho Marx. Wave conviviality , because we were at the beach. All this is now in fashion , there are people who adopted this and did it better than us. This is very important what we did was pave the way ”.
“However”, says Ferran, “ the dining room was not touched . At first we didn't have the money to do it and then we didn't want to. The kitchen was already very strange; people came and thought ' rare '. We did change the tableware, but everything was so strange that if we put Enigma in Montjoi in 1998 or 1999, people would have said “I don't fit in here”. Alberto has been able to do Enigma now.” He refers to the new creation of his brother, recently opened and called to change the gastronomic status quo.
“The reason why we closed the restaurant, one of the ten or twelve, is that we saw that we were not going to be able to go further . We had to change the format. In the last seven years, what has happened? disruptive ? It's very difficult conceptually after elBulli. The only disruptive thing I've seen is Enigma because it's a rethink. You go there and you may like it more or less but it's something else. If in the future you want to do something avant-garde, how do you do it? With a conventional restaurant or Enigma roll? Not copying, eh?, but with the possibilities that he raises”.
Enigma or the end of the 'restaurant' as we know it
A WALK AROUND ELBULLILAB WITH FERRAN
the journey through ElBulliLab hand in hand with Ferran, he goes through questions from What are processed and unprocessed products? a How did humanity begin? . “In these three years we have investigated what is the essential knowledge to re-create ”, he explains.
“It all started with questions like what is the kitchen? either what is creativity? On April 15, 2014 we started here with three tables, and we began to see that this led us to more complex things in different disciplines. You have to understand what is a restaurant and how does a restaurant work ”. Ferran points to a diagram nailed to the wall with dozens of concepts and arrows that interconnect some terms with others, the plan and execution of restaurant operations. Next to it there is a design of the organic systems of the human body, the digestive, the nervous, the circulatory... “We found out that everything comes from here three months ago. It goes by chaos theory and is called an adaptive system . The big problem we have here is how do we explain this so that it's not scary."
"Yeah, don't let it look like a mindfuck."
“This is mindfuck” , he affirms. “When you go to a restaurant and order a fried egg, this is all that happens. We began to see this and we created a theory, we ensure that creation is always in the middle, that people are creative, from the dishwasher to the cook, it has to be an attitude. Everyone has to co-manage. The paradigm shift that is going to take place when all this comes out will be tremendous ”.
“We believe that this is the necessary knowledge for a cook in the West. That he understands that the organic tomato is not natural, but a lie, and this is a terrible manipulation that causes all the mess that there is. And the croquette is not from the grandmother , the court was created in France because it has bechamel. 'Guacamole is not popular Catalan cuisine '. Go now, like croquette! The people make it, the people make it. Today in Catalonia more guacamole is made than escudella . It's not an opinion, it's a fact.
Pumpkin with sweet oil
Starting July 30 elBulliLab de Montjuic will be moving to Cala Montjoi , and the space will become the bulligraphy , an archive-museum that will contain, among other things, a library that we also visited. On its shelves are kept gastronomy books from all eras, recipe books or specialized magazines in what we know as Nouvelle Cuisine –and which is actually the Nouvelle Cuisine of the 20th century, because each era has had its own-. "The book how cooking started it started from necessity, because there was no similar work”, says Ferran about one of the works created by his team. At another time, he opens a recipe book from the year 1768 where the black truffle ice cream . “This today would be modern. What's happening? That no one has chewed the subject; if you are not a great cook you do not know how to read these dishes. For the first time historians and chefs are working holistically . This is the revolution, the revolution of knowledge”.
Adrià's archival desire is insistent , from the collection of recipes that appear in the Phaidon books - 1846 , such as the reformed Bulli and the year of Escoffier's birth - even in his desire to compile the history of gastronomic restoration in the West in the last 30 years. “Archiving makes you not copy” , he asserts.
All this is kept private through the foundation: “This is being paid for by Juli Soler's daughter and myself. Telefónica is our technological partner that provides donations; but the fat is ours, we started it with the sale of the warehouse and others . There is no public euro, so we can do what we want when we want and how we want. All this is about 850,000 euros a year, so we have about 10 years insured ”.
The cocktail Flowers in a pond
We return to the beginning, to the encyclopedic compilation of knowledge in which they have been working for years. “ This is Bullipedia. . A multi-format project that can be on paper, digital, exhibition... or even a record. The other day they made a poetry book, for example, a poetry book about dishes from elBulli. Inside the book there would be learning, not courses, and applications ”.
Ferran Adrià knows how difficult it can be to understand and accept his proposal and he does not hide it: “ There is nothing like it in the world . It's very Martian, very strange, and we still have to learn. This depends on who you explain it to, he will tell you ' What have you smoked?' It is very difficult to understand something extraordinary and disruptive. You ask my brother (Albert Adrià), who is a boss, and he doesn't understand either. Because we have done three projects, one small, another large, there has been the problem of ecology... I was wrong about the times. If I hadn't jumped into the pool today I'd be in the Maldives. I'm telling you the truth, if I get to know this chicken, I don't. It's been six years of cycle, do you need six years to come back? Yes, because it's not a restaurant, it's a laboratory . People who are under no obligation to know me might say, 'What are you up to? You're a chef, what's up with you in this roll of innovation? why do you guys do this?' What's up, they still know elBulli restaurant. And elBulli was not a restaurant, it is a way of understanding life ”.
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elBulli 2005-2011