THENASTYBITS (26 page)

array of backlit ingredients, each in identical, clear glass jars. The place looked more like Dr. No's sanctum sanctorum than a kitchen. But the subject here was always food.

"What is 'better?'" asked Adria, holding up a small, lovely looking pear. "A pear? Or a white truffle? Is a white truffle 'better' because it's more expensive? Because it's rare?" He doesn't know, he said. But he wanted to find out. The
taller,
or studio, is a place where questions are constantly asked, about the physical properties of food ("Can we do this? Can we do that? Can we make a caramel that doesn't break down in humid conditions? Can we make a cappuccino froth that tastes of the essence of carrot? Can we make a hot jellied consomme?"), about dining, about the fundamental nature of cuisine and gastronomy. For six months out of every year, Adria closes his restaurant, and along with his brother Alberto, chemist Pere Castells, industrial designer Luki Huber, and his chef, Oriol Castro, he works here, experimenting, scrupulously documenting everything, and asking questions—some of which are clearly threatening, even heretical to the status quo.

What is a meal?

What is dinner?

What is a chef?

One can't help but ask oneself these things, even as Adria and crew turn their attention to smaller, less metaphysical questions. On this day, as I watched, they were asking if a thick slab of ripe peach could be caramelized to mimic the appearance and consistency of pan-seared foie gras. (Apparently yes.) Can a beautiful fresh anchovy be cooked, yet still appear raw, leaving the attractive outer skin as untouched-looking as it appears in nature? (Seems like it.) Can one make "caviar" from fresh mango puree? (Again, yes.) Of five or six experiments—each conducted in various ways—during the course of the day, generally positive results were recorded in the accompanying charts and notebooks.

"If I can come up with two or three important ideas a year, that's a very good year," said Adria. Many of you have no doubt seen the ripple effects of some earlier successfully executed ideas on menus near you: foam (which he no longer does), hot jellied consomme, pasta made of squid, jellied cheese, frozen foie gras "powder." Say what you will about Adria. Many of the sa chefs who've been sneering at the very idea of him now sham lessly crib his ideas, peeling off the more applicable concepts use in their more conventional menus.

They may ask questions at the
taller,
but a high-risk, high-wire act like El Bulli demands questions of its diners as well. Big questions. Is it food? Or is it novelty? And is it "good"—in the traditional sense of that word (whatever that might be)? At El Bulli, the constantly evolving thirty-course meal seems to gleefully invite furious debate.

The restaurant sits by a remote Mediterranean beach, about seven miles of twisting, clifftop road outside of the town of Roses on Spain's Costa Brava. Invited to join Adria for dinner in the El Bulli kitchen, I sat down and ate what was by turns a shattering, wondrous, confusing, delightful, strangely comforting, constantly surprising, and always marvelous meal.

About thirty different plates appeared in the course of the four-hour experience. The kitchen itself defies convention: cool, quiet, elegant, and modern, with large picture windows and works of sculpture placed throughout. A crew of thirty-five to fifty-five cooks serve one seating per night to an equal number of customers. It is a serious, relatively serene environment, light years away from the fiery mosh pits and sweaty submarinelike spaces most cooks are familiar with.

Voices are seldom raised. There are no shouts or curses, no clatter of pots, no oven doors being kicked closed. The chef and I ate at a plain, white-covered table devoid of elaborate setups or floral arrangement. Whether it was more "experience" or "dinner" I will probably spend the rest of my life figuring out. The evening was a long gastro-thrill ride ranging from the farthest reaches of chemistry class (a single raw egg yolk shellacked in caramel and encased in gold leaf) to the stunningly simple (two pristine, fresh prawns cooked in their own sauce—no other

ingredient). Mr. Adria, who insists he can tell everything important about people by watching them eat, set the pace, eating every course along with me (and in some cases ahead of me), explaining which striking-looking objects to eat first, which second, and how. "Eat in one bite! Quickly!" Pace and rhythm are important, he insisted. "One musn't eat too slowly or one gets sluggish and tired."

"Snacks" arrived first. A green "pine frappe cocktail," artichoke chips, an austere black plate with toasts, sea salt, finely chopped peanuts, and a white toothpaste tube of homemade peanut butter hit the table at the same time as "raspberry lily pads," hazelnut in "textures," lemon tempura with licorice, rhubarb with black pepper, a terrifically tasty row of salty sea cucumber "cracklings" arranged on a tiny black rack, and large puffs of pork scratchings with a yogurt dipping sauce.

"Jamon de toro"
arived next. A pun on the word
toro
(bull), it was in fact fatty tuna belly cured like Iberico ham, served with silver pincers to pick up the ethereally thin slices without bunching or tearing them. The pincers looked (intentionally) like a surgical implement.

Adria watched me eat each course as it appeared, his face lighting up again and again as my expression registered surprise. "Cherries with ham" looked like fondant-covered cherries but were in fact cherries glazed entirely in ham fat. The "golden egg," a tiny golden pillow of egg yolk wrapped in caramel and gold leaf, confronted the palate with flavors in distinct sequence: shock, disorientation, then comforting reassurance. A tiny "Parmesan ice cream sandwich" was an extreme example of a play on comfort food: a salty-sweet remembrance of a childhood that never happened, one of many throughly delicious practical jokes. Apple "caviar"—tiny globules of unearthly apple essence—were served in a faux Petrossian tin. Two crepe courses, one made with chicken skin and the next made, improbably, entirely of
milk
(!), were a pleasure to eat. Pea "ravioli" was a seemingly impossible concoction in which the bright green, liquidy essence of baby peas was wrapped only in itself with no pasta or outer shell to contain it: a ravioli filling miraculously suspended in space. Carrot "air" was an intensely flavored, truly lighter-than-air froth of carrot and tangerine served in a cut-glass bowl. I accidentally inhaled while bringing the spoon to my mouth—aspirating some into my lungs—and struggled to maintain composure as I coughed and turned red. The inconceivable-sounding iced powder of foie gras with foie gras consomme was one of those revelatory concepts for which Adria is famous. A hot, perfectly clear consomme of foie shared a bowl with a just-fallen snow of foie gras "powder." Instructed to eat from one side of the dish then the other, alternating between hot and cold, I was awestruck by the fact that the frozen, finely ground powder somehow maintained its structural integrity in a bowl of hot broth. It defied all known physical properties of the universe. And it was as good as anything cooked anywhere—a direct rebuke to centuries of classical cooking, miles out in front of all the "foie gras cappuccinos" and stacks of "pan-seared foie gras with chutney and microgreens" one sees everywhere these days. I thought it the strongest, best argument for what Adria says he's trying to do. "Every night is like opening night," he says. "It has to be . . . magic."

"Oysters with oysters and yogurt, rolled with macadamia nut" was another astonishing success. Two perfect oysters, in an essence of liquefied smaller oysters, a dot of lemon relish, and then a macadamia yogurt cream, when eaten precisely in sequence, took the tongue on a wild yet strangely familiar ride around the world—and then right back to my very first oyster. A shimmering, translucent globe of raw tuna marrow topped with a few beads of caviar was so good that Adria says, "I won't serve it to my Japanese customers. If the Japanese find out about this the price for tuna bones will go up!" He had a point. The ultralight, unearthly substance tasted like top-quality Edo-style sushi—from another planet. Like nearly everything I tried that night, it had a carefully calibrated progression of clean, precise flavors and a pleasurable aftertaste that didn't intrude on the course to follow.

Cuttlefish and coconut "ravioli" was two tight pillows of cuttlefish that exploded unexpectedly (and disturbingly) in the mouth, flooding it with liquid. When I recovered from the surprise, I looked up to see Adria laughing delightedly. Summer truffle "cannelloni" with veal bone marrow and rabbit brains was rich, over the top, sumptuous and buttery flavored, and the most traditional "entree" of many.

"Two meters of Parmesan cheese spaghetti" was one six-foot-long strand of cheese-flavored consomme suspended with agar-agar. Coiled in a bowl like a small portion of spaghetti carbonara, with a dot of black pepper, it is to be slurped into the mouth (Mr. Adria demonstrated noisily) in one long sucking movement. A single rack of fried anchovy rack—just crispy head and bones— arrived in a funereal cloud of cotton-candy-looking substance and once again tasted wonderful despite its scary appearance.

The unconventional, even horrifying-looking, "chocolate soil," which resembled a bowl full of playground dirt and pebbles, was in fact a conventional tasting chocolate and hazelnut dessert. A "morphing" course of "English bread"—a loaf with the appearance of Wonder Bread that virtually disappeared once placed on the tongue—leaving no trace of ever having been there was followed by a freebie take-home "surprise." A bag with what seemed to be a baguette protruding from it was placed in front of me. Mr. Adria suddenly reached across the table and brought a fist down on it. It shattered into brittle shards of fennel-scented pastry.

Was dinner good? I don't know if that's a word one can use when describing the El Bulli experience. It can be more comfortably described as "great"—meaning hugely enjoyable, challenging to the world order, innovative, revolutionary. It was an uncomfortably revelatory experience for an old-school cook like me who had always thought food was about
terroir
and tradition, the familiar ways in which chefs have always sought to please their customers. Everything about the meal was clear evidence that the world has changed in bold, new, and uncontrollable ways.

Perhaps no one says it better than Juan Mari Arzak, the more traditional chef-owner of the Michelin three-star restaurant Arzak in San Sebastian and Adria's staunchest supporter. "What Ferran does is very
important"
he said, sitting down to join us for coffee and cigarettes at the end of the meal. The two men— Arzak, the passionate Basque, and Adria, the driven, inquisitive Catalonian—have become best friends. "We call each other at four in the morning all the time," Arzak says. " 'I have an idea!' one of us will say. He is moving cooking
forward.'
¹
''

Back in New York, Mr. Ripert is a little more equivocal. "He's a phenomenon. We need
one
Ferran Adria,
not
five. Not even three. I don't see anyone succeeding in emulating him."

In the final analysis, it was while Mr. Adria ate lunch the next day, at
his
favorite restaurant in the world, Rafa's, a simple twenty-seat eatery in nearby Roses, that his true nature, I like to think, revealed itself. The restaurant serves impeccably fresh seafood, almost always cooked with only a little sea salt and olive oil. Rafa, the proprietor, and his wife serve from a single stovetop and tiny grill behind a glass-front counter displaying the catch of only a few hours earlier. After tucking into a few slices of plain grilled sea cucumber, Mr. Adria attacked a plate of screamingly fresh local pawns, greedily sucking the brains and juice from the head. His eyes wild, hands flying, he said, "Magic! It's magic! When we make prawns we dream of Rafa's prawns.
This
is what I want. To find my way to this."

In his own strange and transgressive way, that's exactly what he's done.