Ferran Adrià: 'To eat is the most complex art there is'

There’s a moment in the animated film Ratatouille when the ghost of an haute-cuisine chef turns to Remy the Rat, that unlikely foodie, and says: ‘Anyone can cook.’ OK, this is a kid’s film about a talking rodent – but it’s still true, anyone can cook, and we do. So it’s a craft that we rarely even consider. Nevertheless, some people take it past the ordinary and far beyond the highest expectation – and of those few, Ferran Adrià is the master. Not, I must confess at the outset, that I have eaten a crumb Adrià’s cooked, but take it from those who have: Joel Robuchon calls him the 'best on the planet’; to Heston Blumenthal, ‘Ferran’s a genius. Without a doubt, he’s had the biggest influence on modern gastronomy of any chef alive.’ So he’s good, you see.

Adrià is head chef at El Bulli, a restaurant in northern Spain with three Michelin stars, that has topped the prestigious Restaurant magazine best-in-the-world list five times. But this is a marker of his success, not the reason for it – which is creativity. The 47-year old chef is often compared to fellow Spaniards Picasso and Dali (who used to live down the road, his agent a regular at El Bulli during the 70s – ‘El Bulli’ as it was then, long before Adrià arrived).

Many feel intense reverence towards him – hence the comparison with fine artists rather than chefs. Like Dali’s, like Picasso’s, El Bulli's output is beautiful and revolutionary – textures and flavours are inverted, what looks cold is hot, you expect solid but you get liquid, nothing is as it seems. A coiled spring of virgin olive oil caramel; flowers trapped in candy floss; ravioli made not from pasta but calamari meat, filled with a warm gel of coconut, mint and ginger. The textures, temperatures and flavours at El Bulli are intended to surprise and entertain. Adrià enjoys hearing his customers laughing - and there are all too few chefs who think haute cuisine should be funny.

He’s not what you expect in other ways, either. The idea of the chef has been so caricatured in recent years – we’ve come to expect capitalist machismo or cultural pretension – yet Adrià is friendly, vital, passionate and eager to engage in anything and everything. He tells me he’s done a thousand interviews, speeches or panel discussions over the past year, a level of activity that astonishes me. He talks fast - the interpreter finds it difficult to keep up – as though there is not enough time in the day to get his points across.

We are here to discuss his work at Documenta 12, the major German art fair, in 2007. The fair was in Kassel but Pavilion G was El Bulli in Spain: each day two visitors were selected to go to the restaurant, which many hadn’t heard of. This collaboration resulted in a book, Food for Thought, Thought for Food, edited by artist Richard Hamilton, a lifelong El Bulli devotee, and Tate Modern director Vicente Todoli.

So with the art world courting him, does he consider himself an artist? ‘I’m a cook and I do very beautiful things. We don’t know why the art world hadn’t taken a dialogue with avant-garde cooking before. From that perspective, I’m very happy this dialogue has taken place. But chef will be chef, sculptor will be sculptor and painter will be painter.’ In recent years he’s been called an artist, a magician, a mad scientist, an inventor, but ask Adrià and he’ll say he’s a cook; not a chef, a cook. It’s not actually the first time the art world has come knocking, but it is the first time he’s responded so strongly. Before he’d simply say, ‘I’m happy to help, but I’m not going to do your work for you.’

It’s easy to see parallels between haute cuisine and the classic craft disciplines: hand-made practice; reliance on apprenticeships; the relationship with technology; the balance between tradition and innovation. Aged 21 in 1983, and already experienced in catering, Adrià was working out his military service in the admiral’s kitchen, alongside Fermi Puig. Puig persuaded Adrià to come back with him to El Bulli, already a prestigious restaurant with two Michelin stars – and by the end of 1984, Adrià was on the staff.

Copying is a large part of cooking – think how central the recipe is. Throughout his formative years, Adrià learnt to tell his Escoffier from his Pic, technique upon technique, recipe upon recipe. Even today, he stresses that ‘nobody can do anything from point zero. Always when we create, it comes from somewhere, each dish, each preparation has a history.’

In a chance meeting with chef Jacques Maximin in 1987, the young Adrià learned that ‘creativity means no copying’. Then in 1990, a season working with boundarypushing chef Pierre Gagnaire revealed to Adrià that all restrictions were false and anything was possible. Back in El Bulli, taking this straight to heart, Adrià began ‘creating’ in an unbridled sense, asking questions of his materials and his techniques, finding how everything was possible. Can you make hot jelly? Can you gild an egg yolk? Can you freeze-dry air?

Such intense periods of discovery mean that the restaurant closes for half the year, as Adrià and his fellow cooks experiment. In 1997, he established elBullitaller, a workshop in the Barcelona Aquarium, in 2000 moving it to a converted townhouse in the city centre. This is where the testing and investigating can take place. Each attempt is documented and analysed; there’s even a specialised shorthand. A chief aim of time spent in the workshop is what Adrià calls ‘technique-concept creativity’ – exploring for new ways of cooking, for him the difference between a merely imaginative cuisine and a constantly evolving one.

The restaurant then opens with a completely new arsenal of dishes, around 30, making up the one and only available tasting menu, which is then served to every diner. This format, creating one collection each year, is only a hop skip and a jump from what happens at a fashion house. But while this may be the culinary equivalent of haute couture, Adrià steers clear of explicitly expensive ingredients; there is little meat on the menu for example, and you’re far more likely to be served caviar made from melon than the real deal. Each dish is photographed, recorded and placed in the general catalogue, available in print-form and on El Bulli’s playground of a website.

There are many reasons why El Bulli is unique, but the most surprising is its business plan. As the most celebrated restaurant on the planet, with 400 requests for each seat, it is widely believed not to make a profit. Adrià bought out El Bulli’s founders in 1991, around the time that the restaurant began making waves, but he’s ‘not a businessman. I did business to buy my freedom, so this freedom has given me my creativity. But I get very bored by it.’ He could charge thousands per customer and it would still be full; he could have 25 El Bullis around the world (de rigeur for top chefs) – but he wants neither. This small restaurant, with 50 seats, is the site of such a delicate, concentrated performance that expansion isn’t an option. So it appears that the few eating at the restaurant are subsidised by the many: by brand collaborations with Lavazza and Pepsi among others, by the book sales (a general catalogue is published every five years) and by Adrià’s fees for travelling the world to ‘open dialogue’ with everyone from Google to Harvard University.

Various myths have grown up around Adrià’s practice, one of the most persistent being ‘molecular gastronomy’. Originally the term for genuinely scientific research into food production undertaken by the likes of Herve This, it morphed, in the mid-90s, into the name of a vaguely defined culinary movement. Not only have those at the centre of the movement –Adrià, later Heston Blumenthal – never endorsed it, they actively refuse to accept it.

In 2006, a collective statement was printed in the Guardian newspaper, in which Adria, Blumenthal, US chef Thomas Keller and writer Harold McGee tackled certain ‘misunderstandings’ of their practice and its relationship to technology, novelty and history: ‘Our cooking values tradition, builds on it, and along with tradition is part of the ongoing evolution of our craft.’ The statement emphatically rejected the phrase ‘molecular gastronomy’, along with its implications of rampaging technophiles and mad, humourless scientists - and also made a broader humanising plea to recognise the similarities, rather than the differences, between their practice and those of more traditional chefs.

Like any kind of making, cooking is mediated through tools and technology. Adrià has experimented with liquid nitrogen and the centrifuge. He single-handedly relaunched the siphon, ordinarily that half-forgotten tool for making whipped cream – which he created foams with, from everything and anything, a process copied to exhaustion on all top menus in the 90s. Is there a design studio today that doesn’t insist on negotiation between high-tech tools and the hand? Adrià is similarly adamant that his technologies are entirely for the good of the final dish.

That El Bulli is more concerned with high-tech gadgetry than cookery is another myth he is keen to debunk: ‘It was more advanced in the 80s with microwaves and induction. The siphon! We had it for 50 years already! Unfortunately the technology we have in the kitchen is not advancing as we would like.’ Nevertheless, the role that science and technology play in the kitchen is pivotal for Adrià, not simply for avant-garde cooking but for the future of food in general, to confront the twin menace of obesity and starvation. He is in talks with Harvard University to get high-level research started, and has set up the Alicia Food and Science Foundation, which funds educational and scientific projects promoting good nutrition and culinary heritage.

There are convincing arguments to be made for food as craft, but it is definitely not fine art; it is more important. Central to trade and aid between countries, food is political in the extreme, expressing both our proximity to and distance from the animal world – but it remains always an intensely personal pleasure. For Adrià, ‘To eat is the most complex art there is. It’s the only art with all five senses. You have to concentrate... When I eat with my friends they argue with me! I have spent 15 hours a day, 30 years of my life [working on it], but my friends will say “You are wrong about this.” So this is something special.’