"ferran adria" news and stories

Ferran Adrià is possibly the most famous chef in the world. His restaurant El Bulli, in Spain's Catalonia, accepts six thousand lucky diners a year. A million are turned away annually, and there is a six-year waiting list. The list is going to get a little longer because Adrià announced that he plans to close El Bulli for two years at the end of the 2011 season, and is turning the restaurant into a kitchen laboratory. He's been called the father of foam, and of deconstructive cooking. Oh, and a genius. He's also been labeled a mad scientist who concocts food from chemicals and air. Adrià was recently in New York, and Slashfood sat down for a talk with the Catalan master.

What does deconstructionism mean?
FA: It's one of the styles we've done in the past 25 years. But in the past few years we've hardly done any deconstruction. We started it in '94, we started a new discourse, a new language which people didn't understand, to try and establish some kind of umbilical cord with people in a very unconscious way. The deconstruction style was born, for example, when I created savory ice cream. In '94 it was quite strange, quite unusual to have curry ice cream. So I was creating a dish that had no references; people had nothing they could relate it to. When I made chicken curry I would bring a dish which had curry ice cream, chicken stock, coconut milk. They looked at it and didn't recognize it, and when I told them it was chicken curry they thought I was mad. But when you ate it you would establish the references. I like to make an analogy to Japanese food. If you've never been to Japan and then you go to the most authentic Japanese restaurant, it's a new language -- you will not understand most of the things you will eat, and it seems quite strange. This is what happens at El Bulli, deconstruction helped to establish these links and references.

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.

If there were a Guinness World Record for heftiest, most expensive cookbook, there would be no question that this new arrival would own the slot. At a whopping $625, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the 2,400 page creation of scientists-inventors-cooks Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, is a six-volume guide to molecular gastronomy.

Renowned for his own hand in the movement, Ferran Adrià has already given his blessing, offering a statement on the book's website that "this cookbook will change the way we understand the kitchen."

The volumes are divided as such:
• 1 - "History & Fundamentals"
• 2 - "Techniques & Equipment"
• 3 - "Animals & Plants"
• 4 - "Ingredients & Preparations"
• 5 - "Plated-Dish Recipes"
• 6 - "Kitchen Manual"

Question: What do you get when you put nine of the most famous chefs from around the world in the same kitchen? Answer: A kind of culinary United Nations -- and they're cooking up more than just food.

The Basque Culinary Center, which is based in San Sebastián, Spain, and will open to students next year, is a cooking school with a lofty goal: to better the world, one meal at a time.The council members behind the center are "much more interested in shaping chefs into socially aware activists than in honing their knife skills," the Time article says. "We're talking about the role of the chef in the future," Dan Barber, the chef at New York's Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, told Time magazine. "And in that sense, it's not the revolution inside the kitchen that matters the most."

The Center (which its director, Joxe Mari Aizega, describes as "interdisciplinary," going beyond just cooking) intends to become the "world standard for higher education in cooking," according an article from GlobalPost, and will encourage students to look at food's big picture. Every meal, after all, has a back story, and the more socially, politically, and environmentally aware one is, the more one can appreciate it -- at least, that's how the school's advisory council is looking at it. Consider, for example, where you stand on genetically modified crops, or the hiring practices of cocoa and coffee growers, or even what climate change is doing to growing seasons. As Peruvian chef and advisory council member Gastón Arcurio told Time, "When chefs recognize that we can change the world, we convert cooking into a tool for justice."

At the annual James Beard Foundation awards, held May 3 in Manhattan, many important awards were handed out to many famous chefs. But one of the most interesting tidbits of food-world news was shared backstage after the ceremony at Lincoln Center's Avery Fischer Hall.

Tom Colicchio (the "Top Chef" judge) won the most prestigious award, for Outstanding Chef in America. One chef who was beaten by Colicchio is the Spaniard José Andrés, but he's nevertheless having a fantastic year. Andrés, a disciple of Ferran Adrià, was profiled recently on "60 Minutes," and his Los Angeles restaurant Bazaar is the hottest table in the city.

On the red carpet, Andrés deflected a question about whether the "60 Minutes" piece had led to a flood of reservations.