"FerranAdria" news and stories

Spanish Chef Ferran Adrià told Slashfood that he will be showing plans, photos and details of the much-anticipated "reinvention" of his legendary restaurant El Bulli at a press conference in New York City in March 2011.

Adrià said he has signed a deal with the multinational telecommunications company Telefónica to become a brand ambassador, and that he is working on details of the New York announcement with the company.

During an interview October 13 at the Hotel Eventi's Bar Basque after a screening of the documentary "A Day at El Bulli," he did share a few details about the major changes coming El Bulli, the restaurant in Roses, Spain which receives two million reservation requests a year for just a few thousand places.

The new El Bulli will be more like an educational foundation than a restaurant. "There will be no reservations," Adrià said through his friend and interprereter Chef José Andrés. "And everything will change every month."

What it won't be is limited to the cuisine that made it famous, Adrià's mind-bending innovations with molecular gastronomy. "It is going to be a bigger place, but a completely new philosophy. The main mission of the foundation will be to create, and where everything they create, they will be able to share through [the] internet everyday, with everyone around the world," Andrés explained.

.000001%* of the population will be paid actual cash money to step foot into the on deck circle at Yankee Stadium. Still, that doesn't stop hordes of fans from TiVoing Inside Baseball, poring over box scores and suiting up in team regalia on game day. For some of us, food holds an equally compelling balance of gut-level devotion and wonkish stat-based compulsion. A reservation at elBulli is akin to scoring home team dugout seats for the seventh game of the World Series. Food fans -- here's your program.

It's said that 2,000,000 requests a year come in for just 8000 seats at Ferran Adrià's Spanish temple of molecular gastronomy. The closest many of us will come is grazing through this brand new 528 page play-by-play, A Day at elBulli An insight into the the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adrià. It's not so much the common parlance's "food porn" as it is a post-millennial culinary junkie's process orgy, documenting each staff motion and motivation, every microgram of alginate and liquid nitrogen, and fetishistically breaking down quantity and custom and customer/server semiotics.

The proverbial sausage has never been so obsessively, graphically made for public consumption, and rarely has it been so deliciously presented. There are pleasing pictures and recipes, to be sure (Hazelnut praline air, anyone? Perhaps some Garrapi-nitro pine nuts?), but sans easy access to an Isomalt-R-Us, it's a fever-dream cookbook. It is, however, a deeply heartening food-ifesto.

• Try Thanksgiving with a flair that includes a recipe for roasted brussels sprouts with sunflower or pumpkin seeds.
  
• Recipe: Red wine, pear, and almond tart
• As the economy slows and the wallets thin, new Vancouver restaurants keep opening while others try to survive without excess.
  
• More on Ferran Adria and his Toronto visit.

• Pie pumpkins hit the shelves and gives us the means to lather in pumpkin flavoring.
• And while you make those pumpkin foods, drink Great Lakes Brewery Pumpkin Ale.
• Bread and butter -- it's not longer just a throw-off food for prisoners; it's a gourmet experience.
• Molecular gastronomy: Ferran Adrià talks about food and context, travels to Toronto to discuss A Day at elBulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adrià, and The Star makes Consommé.
• Recipe: Corn, Scallop, and Mussel Chowder

Nestlé, the world's largest food manufacturer, has hired the three-star chef of the world's most popular restaurant to help raise the profile of its chocolates. Ferran Adrià's El Bulli, located on Spain's remote Costa Brava, receives 300,000 reservation requests annually though it takes only 8,000. 

Nestlé is hoping that Adria can help bolster the sales of its chocolate in the face of competition from private-label makers and small premium chocolatiers reports Bloomberg News. Adria will help introduce new varieties of Swiss Cailler chocolate such as jasmine tea. No word yet on whether the wildly creative Adria will help create a confection that involves a blast of liquid nitrogen when the wrapper is torn open.