Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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The chef Thomas Keller is famous
for injecting whimsy and humor
into his cuisine, for example by
serving salmon tartare in an ice
cream cone (see page 3·68) or
creating dishes with names like
“oysters and pearls,” which evoke
references outside the food world.
This kind of reference is a sort of
second cousin to deconstruction.
deconstruction was unique to Adrià and elBulli.
Self-conscious invention is a familiar approach
in other arts, such as literature, where it is common
to reference previous novels, paintings, and
poems and to juxtapose them with other concepts
in a new framework. Indeed, literary allusions and
references are a primary tool for writers and poets.
Yet this approach had never been used in cuisine
in the way Adrià employed it.
Viewed in this light, we see how limited the
Nouvelle revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was: it
was something of a tempest in a teapot by comparison.
Adrià’s approach didn’t merely combat single
features of culinary tradition, such as rouxthickened
sauces. It attacked every convention in
food, including many that we didn’t even realize
were conventions until his innovation pointed
them out.
The World Catches On
For many years, Adrià’s quest for a new cuisine
was a lonely venture set on a remote seashore
along the Catalan coast. It is remarkable that he
and Soler managed to keep a steady clientele in
the face of so much change. The food at elBulli is
intellectually challenging; it demands much of its
diners. Not everyone wants a challenge for
dinner. Yet without clients who appreciated his
food, Adrià could not have proceeded.
Eventually, word spread to the rest of the world
that something extraordinary was occurring in a
most unlikely place. In 1996, Robuchon gave an
interview in which he was quoted as saying that
Adrià was the best chef on earth. That put the
food world on notice, and soon a blizzard of press
brought elBulli to the attention of the world at
large. The publication of the first elBulli books,
also in the 1990s, brought Adrià’s ideas to a still
wider audience.
Adrià has always been happy to learn from
others, and his books are quite generous in crediting
the people who have helped him along the way.
He learned about liquid nitrogen from Heston
Blumenthal in 2004. Similarly, Adrià’s use of
spherification was unique in a restaurant setting,
but it had been known to industrial food scientists
for decades. Related techniques with alginate gels
had long been used in such mundane items as olive
pimentos and cherry pie filling.
Modernist cooking is in many ways founded on
the innovations created at elBulli, but this is not the
story of just one chef and one restaurant. Adrià’s
innovations could have started and ended in the
kitchen of elBulli. He could have been just another
chef making food his own way.
Indeed, that is largely what happened with the
most daring chefs in the French Nouvelle cuisine
movement. Chefs such as Michel Bras, Marc
Veyrat, and Pierre Gagnaire each had his own
William Julius Syplie Peschardt filed
a British patent in 1942 on what we
now call spherification using
alginate.
For more on spherification see page 4·184.
T HE E X PERIENCE O F
A First Meal at elBulli
Chef Grant Achatz wrote the following account of his first
experience at elBulli, which appeared in The New York
Times:
I arrived at The French Laundry early one night so that I
could get some prep done for a VIP table, when I saw
T homas Keller gliding through the kitchen toward me. Every
morning he would greet each cook with a handshake, and
depending on the time, a smile. As he approached on this
day, I noticed something in his hand. He placed the October
1999 issue of Gourmet on the stainless steel counter in front
of me and asked me to open to the page marked with a
yellow sticky note.
I thumbed to the page, finding an unfamiliar, gruff-looking
chef surrounded by floating oranges. Who is this guy, I
wondered … and why is he juggling citrus fruits?
In a short time, that guy would become known as the best
chef in the world. His name was Ferran Adrià.
Chef Keller looked down at the magazine and spoke softly.
“Read this tonight when you go home. His food really sounds
interesting, and right up your alley. I think you should go
stage there this summer … I will arrange it for you.”
Seven months later, I landed at the Barcelona airport. I had
not planned very well and had neglected to make arrangements
for traveling to elBulli, two hours north by car. My
stage started the next day.
As luck would have it, while walking through the airport I
ran into a group of American chefs. Wylie Dufresne, Paul
Kahan, Suzanne Goin, Michael Schlow, and a couple of
journalists had been brought over by the Spanish Tourism
Board to promote Spanish gastronomy. We talked for a bit
before I asked where they were headed. A restaurant called
elBulli, Wylie said, have you ever heard of it? Needless to say
I hitched a ride with them on their posh tour bus.
When I arrived with the American chefs, I felt a bit like a
leech. After all, I was just a sous chef at the time; they were all
established chefs on a funded trip. None of them knew me,
and furthermore I was there to work. When we arrived at
elBulli the co-owner and maître d’hôtel, Juli Soler, welcomed
the group at the door, and the Spanish official who was
leading the tour pulled him aside and explained my story.
I was prepared to put on a chef’s coat, right then and
there, and start working. Juli walked off to the kitchen,
and when he returned he said, “Ferran wants you to eat
with the group.” Well, now I really feel like a parasite, but
if you insist.…
I was a 25-year-old sous chef at what most considered, at
the time, to be the best restaurant in the world. I had grown
up in a restaurant since the age of five. I graduated with
honors from what most considered the best culinary school
in the world. I thought I knew food and cooking.
I had no idea what we were in for. Honestly, none of
us did.
When the dishes started to come I was disoriented,
surprised, amazed, blown away, and, to my dismay, blind to
what was happening. Trout roe arrived, encased in a thin,
perfect tempura batter. I shot Wylie a skeptical glance and
he immediately returned it. We bit into the gumball-size
taste … there was no apparent binder holding the trout eggs
together, and the eggs were still cold, uncooked! How did
they hold the eggs together and then dip them in a batter
without dispersing them into hundreds of pieces? And how are
the eggs not totally cooked? This is cool.…
A small bowl arrived: Ah, polenta with olive oil, I thought.
See, this food isn’t that out there. But as soon as the spoon
entered my mouth an explosion of yellow corn flavor burst,
and then all the texture associated with polenta vanished. I
calmly laid my spoon down on the edge of the bowl after one
bite—astonished.
What the hell is going on back there, I thought. I know
cooking, but this is the stuff of magic.
And on it went … pea soup that changed temperature as I ate
it; ravioli made from cuttlefish instead of pasta that burst with a
liquid coconut filling when you closed your mouth; tea that
came in the form of a mound bubbles, immediately dissolving
on the palate; braised rabbit with hot apple gelatin.… Wait,
how is this possible? Gelatin can’t be hot!
The meal went on in this fashion, for 40 courses and five and
half hours.
Still, I walked into the elBulli kitchen the next day expecting
some familiarity. A kitchen is a kitchen, right?
I was ushered into a small prep room with seven other
cooks, one of whom was René Redzepi of the now famous
restaurant Noma, in Copenhagen. He was my ears and voice
during the stay at elBulli. See, he spoke French, and I do not
speak any Spanish. Listening to the elBulli chef de cuisine, an
Italian chef would translate to the French guy and he would
pass on the instructions to René, who would then translate into
English for me. The group was incredibly international.
Chefs were coming from all over the world to learn this new
style of cooking, yet it did not feel like cooking at all. “Concepts”
better describes the dishes. There were no flaming
burners, no proteins sizzling in oil, no veal stock simmering on
the flat top.
Instead I saw cooks using tools as if they were jewelers.
Chefs would huddle around a project like wrapping young
pine nuts in thin sheets of sliced beet or using syringes to fill
miniature hollowed-out recesses in strawberries with Campari
with precision. Everything was new and strange to me: the way
the team was organized, the techniques being used, the sights,
and even the smells. To me it was proof that this was a new
cuisine, because none of it was routine.
I have returned to elBulli to dine twice since the summer of
2000. Each time I was in a different state of maturity as a chef
and a diner, and each time Ferran managed to make me feel a
childlike giddiness. He evoked a sense of wonder and awe in
the medium that I know best.
People often ask me if the style of cooking he pioneered is a
trend, fad, or flash in the pan. My belief is that every 15 to 20
years, with an obvious bell curve of energy, most professions
change. Technology, fine arts, design, and yes, cooking, follow
the same predictable pattern. A visionary creates the framework
for a new genre, others follow and execute, and the residual
effects remain, embedded in the cloth of the craft. If we look
back to Nouvelle cuisine, founded in the early ˇ70s by Bocuse,
Chapel, Troisgros, Guérard, Vergé, and Oliver, we see the
pattern clearly. Protégés of great chefs eventually forge their
own paths to help create a new style. This lineage carried us into
the Keller, Bouley, Trotter, and Boulud generation in the United
States, and subsequently chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Andoni Luis
Aduriz, Homaro Cantu, and I forged our own paths.
38 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 39