El Bulli is other-worldly, a restaurant without peer, strange, influential, misunderstood, controversial, and by many accounts simply the best. It employs technique, service, and flavour that is provactive, experiential, ground-breaking and operates on a level so apart from anything else calling itself a restaurant that it demands to be considered as art. Ferran and Albert Adria are indefatigable in their pursuit of discovering knowledge, and without question in my mind are the icons of this culinary age of knowledge producers. As a knowledge consumer of the flavor wisdom, patterns, and techniques coming of El Bulli, I'm more than a little overwhelmed by the intricacy of the recipes; really in reading this tome, the recipes are almost a distraction from the book's apparent main objective: providing a treatise on how to best pursue culinary perfection.
It is exhausting to witness a day at El Bulli, the creative process, the symphony in the kitchen, the dialogue between the chefs and the customers. But mostly, the book is an inspiration, the format by Phaidon is gorgeous, methodical, completely absorbing. The content is insightful, obsessive in its detail on what it really takes to create and maintain an El Bulli, day in and day out. While other sites have quoted El Bulli by the numbers, the points that stood out to me the most were as follows:
- For 50 guests a night, there are 1500 dishes served by 40 chefs
- Annually, 5000 chefs apply to be part of the El Bulli crew
- At the end of the evening, 4 staff members wash 2500 pieces of dishware, cookware, and cutlery
- All 40 chefs participate in the cleanup, and hauling of the trash offsite
- El Bulli is too remote to have gas lines, so all cooking is performed with electric equipment
- During the 160 days of service, El Bulli devotes 9 hours a day toward the creation of new dishes, on top of the 6 months of dedicated time devoted in the off season; all this work is documented in notebooks, complete with pictures
Two final thoughts in my, admittedly, cursory evaluation of a Day at El Bulli:
- El Bulli works to impart an experience to the diner, via not only the 5 senses, but intentionally working on a 6th sense, an intellectual recognition of the chef's intent or the diner's lifes experiences, be it irony, a wink to something in their past, a prodding to make one experience something familiar very differently or in a completely new context
- A Day at El Bulli is historical both in the acute scope of the book devoting itself to such a small moment in the culinary history of this landmark restaurant, but also in the level of insight it reveals of the inner workings of El Bulli, the code of Ferran Adria (worthy of a post unto itself), its dichomatic sense of history and devotion to the future of gastronomy.
As influential as Ferran Adria already is, the fervor of all things El Bulli will eventually fade from the short-term memories of comtemporary food enthusiasts, but this book may well be studied by gourmands and culinary students for decades to come.
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