Thoughts on "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress"

Last night, I joined a couple of friends to catch the new documentary on Ferran Adrià's restaurant El Bulli (recently closed to be restructured as a culinary academy). All in all, this is a good film that provides insight into the processes, creativity, and plain ol' hard work that went into creating most highly regarded avant-garde cuisine in the world. Particularly interesting was the manner in which the chefs talked about constructing individual dishes, which strongly reminded me of the way my orchestra conductors (from many years ago) talked about composing music and structuring a performance.

On an entirely different note, the movie also interested me as a scientist in the meticulousness in the chefs displayed in their experiments to find new tastes and methods, even if they engaged in the big no-nos of taking notes on loose leaf paper and in pencil. Also, I was possibly the only person in the theater who laughed at Adrià's question, "Is Nature an important magazine?" Yes, yes, it is, and I would strongly the possibility of sacrificing my grandmother to have a publication in it.

With simple, though well done, shots and with neither narration nor text explanations, this movie clearly targets a very specific audience, and I strongly suspect that people who aren't "foodies" would be easily lost, e.g., in identifying some of the items Adrià's head chefs play around with. Additionally, as my friends noted, this movie is perhaps a bit too long, and several scenes, such as the one showing Adrià tasting and making notes (without subtitles enplaning what exactly he was writing), could have been easily cut without significantly impacting the movie.

A question I walked away with and still haven't found a good answer for is whether I would have actually paid the 250-odd Euros to have eaten at El Bulli; that price was certainly more than reasonable for what one got, even if it contributed to the financial difficulties the restaurant found itself in prior to its closing. As Adrià himself noted in this profile in The Observer, the point of dining at such places is not necessarily "good food" but the emotional experience of witnessing chefs at their creative best:

Ask Adrià and he will agree that a piece of plain fish, freshly caught and grilled to perfection can be as pleasing to taste as the elaborate invention of the cleverest chef. "Eating well is something you can do at home. The point about what we offer is that it is more than eating; it is an experience," says Adrià, who in one of his books has defined eating at El Bulli as a night out at the theatre. "What's radical about us rests not on what we serve, but on how and where."

My issue then is that while the food that came out of El Bulli looks stunning as works of art (AKA food pron), something about the molecular gastronomy dishes doesn't have the same strong emotional appeal to me as the more traditionally prepared ones from restaurants such as The French Laundry and Le Bernardin. Certainly I would have found Adrià's food delicious and interesting, but somehow, I don't think it would have given me that "I wish I had just one more bite of that" feeling Thomas Keller identifies as key to haute cuisine. And that to me is the whole point of seeking to dine at restaurants such as El Bulli.

Finally, one of my other favorite clips from the movie: shopping Barcelona’s La Boqueria market. It said something about the clout and respect chefs from El Bulli had when they could go and buy exactly seven individual grapes and three beans: