elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food
Jun 28, 2013 11:16:18 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Jun 28, 2013 11:16:18 GMT -5
Good afternoon to you all! May I take this opportunity to wish you all a most enjoyable weekend. Writing in the FT, Tim Hayward visits elBulli for all: the legendary restaurant may have closed, but Ferran Adrià is determined his culinary legacy will live on.
As it happens, my parents went on their honeymoon to the Costa Brava (in Franco's Spain), although I don't think that the food was up to much! We had a bottle of Cava together there a few years ago, but nothing like 'elBulli', arguably the greatest restaurant in the world! Roses is a faded seaside town on the Costa Brava, its pastel paint peeling a little in the stiff breeze off the Mediterranean; the streets, off season, populated with superannuated bohemians and French families from over the border, there for the weekend markets. Cala Montjoi is a 20-minute ride out of town along increasingly beautiful cliff-top roads, penetrating deeper and deeper into a highly protected National Park. Each passing cove is more gorgeous than the last until finally you reach the perfect one and there, set back a little from the beach, is the most important restaurant in the world.
Any food writer worth his salt – and any food fetishist with sufficient money and luck – has made the pilgrimage from Roses to Cala Montjoi. But unlike every other food writer and food lover, I’ve come too late. I’ve travelled miles to see a restaurant closed up, the windows roughly blocked with brown paper, curtains drawn, the garden filling with leaves and fallen pine needles and a steady flow of inquisitive tourists photographing each other on a terrace where most could never have dreamt of eating. Tim concludes thus:
Due to unprecedented demand from around the world, everyone reading 'The Third' is cordially invited next weekend to Somerset House, which will host a major retrospective exhibition on a global icon of gastronomy, Ferran Adrià, and the restaurant he built to become the world’s best, elBulli. In partnership with Estrella Damm, 'elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food' is the world’s first exhibition dedicated to a chef and his restaurant. The retrospective will showcase the art of cuisine and cuisine as art by taking a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary laboratory and kitchen of the internationally renowned restaurant, which delighted diners in Cala Montjoi, a small picturesque bay on the Catalan coast near Roses, for over 50 years.
Charting the evolution of elBulli, the exhibition will feature an in-depth, multimedia display of each of the essential ingredients that make up the culinary creative mastermind of Ferran Adrià and his team: research (handwritten notes and hand-drawn sketches); preparation (plasticine models, which were made for all the dishes served as a means for quality control of colour, portion size and position on the plate, and the specially-designed utensils used); presentation (original tasting menus, cutlery laid on the tables and salivating shots of the creations taken from the catalogue to be published by Phaidon next year), and plaudits (original restaurant reviews and other press clippings). Combined with archive footage of the chefs and clientele, the exhibition’s ephemera are testament to Adrià’s abundant talent, genius and ambition.
Adrià said of the Somerset House show: “Even though the restaurant of elBulli is now closed, the spirit of elBulli is still very much alive and this exhibition is one of the ways of keeping it so. For some, I hope it will revive good memories, and for others it will give a flavour of a fine dining experience like no other. Overall, it is an ode to the creativity, imagination, innovation, talent and teamwork of everyone at elBulli, but especially the world-famous chefs who trained with us and took these values into their own restaurants around the world.
“I am delighted to be presenting it in London at the prestigious Somerset House, another creative hub which, like elBulli, always invites you to try something new and perhaps a little unpredictable.”
If you cannot make it to Somerset House in person this summer, here is the exhibition online:
Somerset House - elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food
I propose some toast: to my mother, my father and Ferran Adrià! Three cheers from kleines c and the gang (Friday afternoon tea)!
Somerset House - Tom's Terrace
As it happens, my parents went on their honeymoon to the Costa Brava (in Franco's Spain), although I don't think that the food was up to much! We had a bottle of Cava together there a few years ago, but nothing like 'elBulli', arguably the greatest restaurant in the world! Roses is a faded seaside town on the Costa Brava, its pastel paint peeling a little in the stiff breeze off the Mediterranean; the streets, off season, populated with superannuated bohemians and French families from over the border, there for the weekend markets. Cala Montjoi is a 20-minute ride out of town along increasingly beautiful cliff-top roads, penetrating deeper and deeper into a highly protected National Park. Each passing cove is more gorgeous than the last until finally you reach the perfect one and there, set back a little from the beach, is the most important restaurant in the world.
Any food writer worth his salt – and any food fetishist with sufficient money and luck – has made the pilgrimage from Roses to Cala Montjoi. But unlike every other food writer and food lover, I’ve come too late. I’ve travelled miles to see a restaurant closed up, the windows roughly blocked with brown paper, curtains drawn, the garden filling with leaves and fallen pine needles and a steady flow of inquisitive tourists photographing each other on a terrace where most could never have dreamt of eating. Tim concludes thus:
" ... Our time has run over, I switch off the recording machine and the photographer packs his bag. “Do you have five minutes?” Adrià asks. “I’ll show you something.”
We follow as he leads out of the Taller, down into the bustling Ramblas. People step aside as he powers through the crowd, intense and gesticulating. Adrià poses questions, utters “provocations” but never really pauses: “They say the food at elBulli was complicated and that something like pa amb tomàquet is simple. But if you grow the wheat, mill it, raise and bake it, if you grow the tomatoes and garlic to spread on it, crush the olives to make the oil, then isn’t it far more complex?” We arrive at a building a couple of blocks away, rising through an echoing stairwell to what looks like the entrance to a flat.
He unlocks the door and we walk into a room half the length of a football pitch filled with archive boxes, shelving, file upon file, books, magazines and newspapers. Standing in front of every accretion of material are the ubiquitous boards, pinned with lists and patterns. Tonnes of material in teetering piles. Adrià ricochets round the maze like a pinball: “The press archive”, “Look, the drawings for the kitchen at elBulli”, “Recipes”, “Academic papers”, “More than 40,000 documents. The incredible thing is that we never threw anything away.”
Suddenly, in the very real space of the room, the awe-inspiring scale of the project has a three-dimensional reality."
We follow as he leads out of the Taller, down into the bustling Ramblas. People step aside as he powers through the crowd, intense and gesticulating. Adrià poses questions, utters “provocations” but never really pauses: “They say the food at elBulli was complicated and that something like pa amb tomàquet is simple. But if you grow the wheat, mill it, raise and bake it, if you grow the tomatoes and garlic to spread on it, crush the olives to make the oil, then isn’t it far more complex?” We arrive at a building a couple of blocks away, rising through an echoing stairwell to what looks like the entrance to a flat.
He unlocks the door and we walk into a room half the length of a football pitch filled with archive boxes, shelving, file upon file, books, magazines and newspapers. Standing in front of every accretion of material are the ubiquitous boards, pinned with lists and patterns. Tonnes of material in teetering piles. Adrià ricochets round the maze like a pinball: “The press archive”, “Look, the drawings for the kitchen at elBulli”, “Recipes”, “Academic papers”, “More than 40,000 documents. The incredible thing is that we never threw anything away.”
Suddenly, in the very real space of the room, the awe-inspiring scale of the project has a three-dimensional reality."
Due to unprecedented demand from around the world, everyone reading 'The Third' is cordially invited next weekend to Somerset House, which will host a major retrospective exhibition on a global icon of gastronomy, Ferran Adrià, and the restaurant he built to become the world’s best, elBulli. In partnership with Estrella Damm, 'elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food' is the world’s first exhibition dedicated to a chef and his restaurant. The retrospective will showcase the art of cuisine and cuisine as art by taking a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary laboratory and kitchen of the internationally renowned restaurant, which delighted diners in Cala Montjoi, a small picturesque bay on the Catalan coast near Roses, for over 50 years.
Charting the evolution of elBulli, the exhibition will feature an in-depth, multimedia display of each of the essential ingredients that make up the culinary creative mastermind of Ferran Adrià and his team: research (handwritten notes and hand-drawn sketches); preparation (plasticine models, which were made for all the dishes served as a means for quality control of colour, portion size and position on the plate, and the specially-designed utensils used); presentation (original tasting menus, cutlery laid on the tables and salivating shots of the creations taken from the catalogue to be published by Phaidon next year), and plaudits (original restaurant reviews and other press clippings). Combined with archive footage of the chefs and clientele, the exhibition’s ephemera are testament to Adrià’s abundant talent, genius and ambition.
Adrià said of the Somerset House show: “Even though the restaurant of elBulli is now closed, the spirit of elBulli is still very much alive and this exhibition is one of the ways of keeping it so. For some, I hope it will revive good memories, and for others it will give a flavour of a fine dining experience like no other. Overall, it is an ode to the creativity, imagination, innovation, talent and teamwork of everyone at elBulli, but especially the world-famous chefs who trained with us and took these values into their own restaurants around the world.
“I am delighted to be presenting it in London at the prestigious Somerset House, another creative hub which, like elBulli, always invites you to try something new and perhaps a little unpredictable.”
If you cannot make it to Somerset House in person this summer, here is the exhibition online:
Somerset House - elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food
I propose some toast: to my mother, my father and Ferran Adrià! Three cheers from kleines c and the gang (Friday afternoon tea)!
Somerset House - Tom's Terrace