Love and Other Ways of Dying (6 page)

“The tomato is American.”

“The prawn head is Spanish.”

“In the end everything already exists; we’re not inventors of anything. But this is the definition of creativity. It’s seeing what other people don’t see.”

“Laughing brings out the good in food. It’s good to laugh. If you don’t laugh, you’re going to magnify. And if you magnify, you’re going to die.”

“The important thing is the miniskirt, not what color it is.”

5. [CONCERNING THE EFFECT OF TOMATO HEARTS ON WEDDED DISCOURSE]

One afternoon Carlos and I took the long drive into the mountains along the Mediterranean toward El Bulli. Up there everyone vanished, the sky came closer, the sea sparkled. If it was treacherous to drive the hairpins and potholes, it was suddenly much easier to breathe. Later, when I asked Ferran to describe the perfect meal, he stressed that there had to be magic in arrival. That it had to be a place hard to get to or somehow earned. That the journey, more than any appetizer or cocktail, would remind you of your hunger.

Now it was time to eat. Carlos and I had been invited to have lunch in the kitchen so we could taste and watch at the same time. It felt like an exploratory mission, a warm-up to the main event, which would come a few nights later. We were seated at a wide wooden table with two place settings and a couple of wine goblets full of light. We were asked if we had any allergies (none) and then came the welcome cocktail, what the waiter called a “hot-cold margarita.” When I picked it up, the glass was partly warm and partly cool to the touch, since by some process the drink had been both heated and chilled at once. The margarita was tangy and airy, and the temperature difference, the movement from hot to cold, created a tumbling sensation, a tequila wave with a triple sec undertow, ending on one arctic, sweet note. We were startled into smiles.

And though whimsy has made Ferran Adrià famous, one soon realizes that a meal at El Bulli is driven by calculation and logic, coordinated through the phalanx of chefs at their various stations. Each guest eats roughly two dozen dishes, and if the diner simply rises to go to the bathroom, she can break an almost sacred rhythm that Ferran feels is crucial to the meal, to the variations in temperature and texture that help give his food its character.
“The plate is a song,” he says. “If the harmony is too slow, the person who receives the plate isn’t receiving what the chef intended. There’s a rhythm that’s hard to explain, but it changes everything.” Ferran’s sense of time, then, guides the journey of every morsel from kitchen to mouth, and once it’s there, he wants you to taste it as he does. And that occasionally requires spoken instruction. “The feeling of cold and hot is very different in one bite than in two bites,” he says. “Sometimes, two bites makes all the difference.”

Because much of what’s eaten here seems without context, the meal itself, the rush of these dishes, builds a new context in which tastes emerge with shot-glass intensity from a nebula of cool mists and jellies. The idea is that a new dish will be launched every five minutes, no more than ten seconds after it’s ready, and in those intervals between dishes, a guest will experience both sensual and psychic liftoff, to be repeated five minutes later. In theory, this makes the meal two hours long, though often people will linger a couple of hours longer at the table.

“We are inviting fifty people into our home every night,” says Ferran. “It should be the greatest event of their lives.”

The trick, of course, is to translate the ideas of Ferran’s fertile mind into living dishes, up to two hundred different ones in a night. Further, each dish must be prepared en masse, then delivered to the table according to a nearly-impossible-to-achieve Ferran standard. And the fear of not reaching that standard is what drives the dizzying, obsessive pace in the kitchen.

From our vantage point, it was all just an endless rush of plates passing to and fro. Suddenly, a tray crowded with goodies appeared before us, and another, and another—what Ferran calls first and second and third “snacks,” which are meant to be fun and lighten the mood before the main courses. None were recognizable.

There was dried quinoa in a paper cone, and, when I tilted it back into my mouth, the quinoa lightly pelted my tongue and echoed in my ears like a fine rain turning crunchy. There were also seaweed nougat (salty and sublime), deep-fried bits of prawn (so light they disintegrated before they could be rightly chewed), and strawberries filled with Campari (every cell cloying, the strawberries more strawberry because of the liqueur). No sooner would one marvel cease, one of us sputtering, What was
that
?, than the next bit of Martian food would arrive. It all ended in a strange, caramelized cube that I lifted with my thumb and forefinger and gently slid onto my tongue. Only after shattering it between my teeth did the object reveal itself: yogurt bursting from its candied shell in a warm, smooth flood.

Ferran shuttled between our table and his capos—the white-shirted generals running the kitchen—as an unceasing drift of guests came back to meet him. There was a famous wine critic who produced a rare Japanese spice. Some fabulously rich people shook Ferran’s hand and gushed, “You don’t see this every day,” and Ferran said, “No, this is every day.” A photographer from a Danish magazine, a tanned woman with very blond hair and long legs, wearing a sheer pinafore and a light-blue bikini underneath, climbed onto a table and started taking photographs. And for a second, everything stopped, sighed … then resumed in double time.

“Where the hell are the tapiocas?” a capo yelled at the hunched-over chefs on the line. “We’re going to get punished here. Let’s go!”

It was hard not to feel ridiculous, supping on delicacies while people worked at breakneck speed to get them to us. But we didn’t overanalyze this because the main dishes, fourteen in all, began to arrive. And each dish was … was … how to explain it?

In Ferran Adrià’s restaurant, nothing is for certain once his food crosses the Maginot Line of your mouth. He feeds you things you never thought existed, let alone things you’d think to eat: a gelatin with rare mollusks trapped inside (it was so odd, the cool, sweet jelly parting for salty pieces of the sea, that it tasted primordial and transcendent at once), tagliatelle carbonara (chicken consommé solidified and cut into thin, coppery, pastalike strands that, once glistening on the tongue, dissolved back into consommé that poured down the throat), cuttlefish ravioli (the cuttlefish sliced with a microtome, then injected with coconut milk, another sweet explosion that seemed to wrap the fish in a new sea), rosemary lamb (we were told to raise sprigs of rosemary to our noses as we munched on the lamb, both of us now with rosemary mustaches, the smell of rosemary becoming the lamb as if the two were the same)… and it went on like this.

I will tell you: We were happy. We were served an eighty-year-old vinegar pooled in an apple gelatin with ginger, and vinegar has never tasted so gentle, so perfectly between sweet and sour, with a trace of gin, so unlike vinegar that it redefined vinegar. I would drink that vinegar every day, if I could, to start every day with a little pucker and smile. There was dessert, too … a first dessert and a second dessert and then more snacks. At the end, when we went to him, Ferran waved us off, saying, “Today you eat, tomorrow we’ll think.”

And so Carlos and I drove back down to Roses and the hotel. The clouds appeared as purple-lit dirigibles, and more light beamed across the sea. When we returned to the hotel and took a swim (the sea tasting like something made by Ferran Adrià) and sat down for some sangria on the terrace, when I tried later to describe the meal to Sara, I couldn’t find any words. There were no words that came to mind. But I tried.

I tried to describe one dish in particular, an amazing, complicated
thing, really. It was monkfish liver served as a pâté and, floating on top of it, a froth of soy foam. On the plate, in orbit around this foie-soy structure, were quasars of orange, lemon, grapefruit, and, finally, what stopped me, what I startled at, tomato hearts. They were just the guts of the tomato, really, its oozing seeds and essence.

What I meant to tell my wife, but couldn’t, was that when I ate the substance of liver and foam with some grapefruit and then scooped the heart, naked and dripping, into my mouth, I’d felt, in all my happiness and weird heady lightness, something else, too: an undercurrent of impermanence, some creeping feeling of danger and fear. All of it in this single bite that slid down my throat. I might have grimaced as I swallowed it; I might not have. But when I looked up, I met the gaze of Ferran Adrià, who stood across the kitchen, watching, and I wondered whether he thought I didn’t like what I was eating. Or whether he knew exactly what I felt, had searched for that expression on my face, because he knew what it was to eat a heart, and he’d felt it, too.

6. [ON THE AHISTORICAL CONUNDRUM OF THE GREAT FERRAN ADRIÀ]

It’s as likely that he’d have ended up a car mechanic as a chef, if not for the pleasure of beer. After quitting high school and moving to Ibiza with the full intention of living the party life, Ferran took a job washing dishes to pay for his cervezas. Up until that moment, he had subsisted on beefsteak and french fries. That’s all he ate—and that’s all he wanted to eat.

But working in restaurants, he slowly indoctrinated himself into a multifarious world of taste, its bombast and truths. And by the time Ferran left Ibiza at twenty, he had decided: He would learn everything he could about cuisine, and through cuisine he would know everything about the world. He read Escoffier and
Larousse. He made the recipes of dead chefs with zealous devotion. He had a friend who was working up the coast from Barcelona at El Bulli, a two-star restaurant with a loyal if somewhat limited clientele, and in 1983, he hitched three hours north with the thought of picking up some quick money. Eighteen years later, he’s still here.

Ferran is thirty-nine now and no more than five foot five in black-stockinged feet. He has a hairless chest with no muscles, exactly, and a bulging belly. (This vision appeared to me one day when he changed into his chef’s whites without thought of anyone else in the room.) He does, in fact, possess almost nothing of his own. He never cooks for himself or friends and always eats out, usually traveling the world two or three times a year to eat, except for Christmas Day, when he cooks with his brother for their parents at home. Though he could buy them a Mercedes, and would, they don’t want one. It would change the context of their lives, he says, and they’re happy with their lives.

In the kitchen, Ferran Adrià is demanding, withering, Napoleonic. His dissatisfaction may manifest itself like an unexpected thunderstorm. But he’s almost preternatural to watch, like Picasso captured on film, changing a strawberry to a rooster to a woman in a few brushstrokes.

Even now he dreams of a day when a restaurant will be less a museum (serving the same, same, same) than an experiment (serving the new), when a computer screen will bring the revolution into all of our homes, Ferran greeting us after work with a fifteen-minute recipe for his chicken curry, a succulent, deconstructed confusion of solid curry and liquid chicken that turns chicken curry on its head.

And yet, it’s odd: For being one of the most self-actualized men I’ve met, he is also one of the most ahistorical. When I ask him to describe the best meal he’s ever eaten, he says he erases his
memories so he doesn’t live for a moment he can never bring back. When I ask about his grandparents, he can recall nothing about them. “I think my grandfather died in the Spanish Civil War,” he said. “Ten times—ten times I’ve been told, and ten times I’ve forgotten. Since I didn’t know him, it’s as if he never existed.” When I suggest that it’s a bit strange not to know the first thing about your grandfather but then to be able to quote a recipe by Escoffier from 1907, he says, “Not at all. My life is kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. History doesn’t interest me, the kitchen does.”

Politics? “I’m in the center. It doesn’t play into my life.”

Religion? “Do I pray when someone’s sick? Yes. Otherwise, no.”

Hobbies? “Hobbies?”

Mentors? “I came as a virgin to the kitchen.”

When I ask if it troubles him when people don’t understand the invention and game of his cuisine, he says, “Some people come here and see God; a few come and see the devil. The truth is relative.”

The truth is relative? “I mean that only the tongue tells the truth. History doesn’t tell it, religion doesn’t. All that concerns me really is what the food tastes like. I am the chef, so I have to ask: Does it amaze me? Is there a before and after? If there is, then good. Let’s eat.”

7. [ON TASTE]

“The difference between a grand chef and a magical chef,” Ferran said as we whizzed down the mountain, “is that a magical chef knows not just what he’s eating, but how to eat.”

“And how does a magical chef eat?” Carlos asked. Ferran’s eyebrows rose at that, and an “Ahh” passed his lips. Then he grinned and said, “You are about to see.”

We had asked Ferran to pick his favorite place for lunch in
Roses. He had us park and led us down an alley that spilled into another alley that opened onto a walking street outside a place called Rafa’s. The restaurant, named after its owner, was a simple, traditional, open-air seafood grill with wooden tables. And Rafa himself seemed plainly hungover. While we sat, he disappeared into the back, then reappeared with a red bandanna that he wrapped deliberately around his head, ears jutting out. And once he’d knotted it, he was suddenly transformed. “Okay,” he said in a gruff voice. “Okay.” Samurai Rafa.

“There’s nothing like this place,” said Ferran, pleased. When the waitress read the day’s menu, when she was through reciting twenty or so items, Ferran looked at her and simply said, “Yes,” and then clarified, “Yes, all of it. A little bit of all of it. And whatever else the chef has.” She looked over her shoulder at Rafa, who nodded slightly and winked. And then the dishes came, each
plato
reflecting the way food has been served in Catalonia for hundreds of years. Tomatoes slathered on peasant bread. Sliced prosciutto on a plate. Succulent anchovies, lightly peppered, in olive oil. A small mountain of
tallarines
, tiny, buttery clams that we pried from their shells with our tongues, the empty shells piling like fantastic, ancient currency.