blakej

My impressions about when new dishes arrive come from Arthur Lubow's NYT article from August 2003: During the six months that the restaurant on the Costa Brava is closed, [Adrià] works on new recipes in a "laboratory" near the Barcelona market [...]. During the summer season, however, the laboratory is moved to the restaurant kitchen in Rosas. There Adrià convenes in the afternoon (lunchtime at more traditional establishments) with Albert and Castro. (Later in the article: ) [Adrià] had observed [one new idea] late last summer but waited until this season to make something of it; inspirations that strike after July are postponed a year. This suggested to me that new dishes can get developed and rolled out over the course of the year. But, of course, there are plenty of people in this forum (probably including you!) that have more first-hand knowledge about it than I do.

I certainly didn't mean to rain on your parade! It looks like this forum had a number of people who dined there in May, so I guess it's not too surprising that the writeups are all coming out at around the same time. I'm looking forward to hearing about the dishes you got at the kitchen table.

Thanks! I'm pleased with how well the pictures turned out - I think we were just seated in places that had good lighting. I think just as interesting as the seasonality of the ingredients will be seeing how the selection of dishes evolves over the course of the year. By August, they may have perfected some amazing new thing that's just an experiment right now, or they may have retired something that didn't work too well. I hope they decide that the olives are a keeper. My dinner took probably 4.5 hours, from kitchen tour to paid bill. I think mine might have been shorter than average since we left pretty quickly after the Morphings, but I thought the pacing was appropriate given the size and number of courses. Did you think your meal at Alinea was well-paced and appropriately sized?

I had the opportunity to have dinner at elBulli on May 25th. Since I credit Louisa Chu's posting last October with helping to get the reservation, I thought I'd share my experience with eGullet. The review I wrote up is aimed at friends and family, so it goes over some details about the restaurant that this crowd already knows, but you can skip over those parts. The full writeup, with lots of pictures, is at http://foo.net/~blakej/elbulli/ I didn't have the benefit of talking with the chefs, dining at the kitchen table, or even really speaking much Spanish at all, so I don't have the details about the dishes that some of the other folks here do. But I did my best to figure out what was going on. My one-sentence summary of the event would be that it was the best meal of my life (so far), but it was too much food. I guess with 26 courses, that's not too surprising, but I think that could've been avoided. Am I a big-meal weakling, or have others had this reaction?

I'll be there on May 25th. I've only posted a few times on eGullet so far, so that couldn't have influenced my getting in. I've been sadly lax in following the rest of this discussion, but I plan to hit the rest of the local places that have been mentioned (Rafa's, Snackmar, and anything else in Louisa's wonderful blog). I think it helped that I was flexible, and that I was reloading the "Spain and Portugal" forum once an hour on October 14th.

Chef Adrià, Thanks so much for sharing your time and ideas with us here at eGullet. How important is traditional Spanish cuisine and, in particular, Catalan cuisine to the "nueva cocina" as you practice it today? And as interest for this type of culinary experimentation grows worldwide, how important will it be to adapt this practice to the practitioners' traditional cuisine? Regards, Blake Jones

I'm surprised they didn't charge for the smell. ← Y'know, I would've been willing to pay for that smell. I've joked about that before, at a truffle dinner at La Folie where they brought out the basket of black truffles and let us take a sniff ("that was probably a two-buck sniff right there!"), but the aroma of the white truffle at Far West was truly in a league of its own. One of my friends, who I took to the Ferry Building for the first time a couple months ago, commented that one of the best things about it was all the free good smells. And while truffles are anywhere in the neighborhood of $230/oz, free smells are all I'm going to be having.

The mushroom shop at the Ferry Building (Far West Fungi), which others have mentioned, had black truffles from France and a few white ones from Alba last Saturday. The incredible heat wave in Europe last year sent prices sky-high, and they don't seem to have come down much at all this year. Far West was selling white truffles for around $230/oz last weekend. I didn't buy any, but I took a sniff of one little one that they had in its own holder ... it was the most intense truffle smell I've ever experienced. Pretty amazing. They also had fresh porcini, chanterelles, black trumpets, cinnamon caps, and a few small matsutake. I've been really pleased with everything I've gotten there, though they do charge Ferry Building prices.

In the past few years at least, they've been closed on Mondays and Tuesdays in April through June. See here.

I got my long-awaited reply this morning. Not only was Luis as gracious as everyone has described, but I got one of the exact dates in May that I had asked for. I'll certainly write up my experience once I get back - it's the least I can do for having gotten the tip on reservations. Thanks again!

In fact, it was your post saying that you'd heard something that made me nervous, because unlike Miguel you hadn't heard anything earlier. I asked for five specific weekdays in May; failing that, any day in May; failing that, any day at all. I've been saving frequent-flyer miles and vacation days for a few years now, intending to use them for food tourism in Catalunya (and El Bulli in particular), and I want to use them before United goes out of business. Thanks for the note. I'll try to stay patient and hopeful.

First, thanks to all for your interesting commentary so far, and to Louisa for her advice about when to send in requests. I've been lurking on eGullet on and off for a year now, and I've been meaning to subscribe for a while. My interest in El Bulli finally convinced me to sign up. Has anyone else here who sent in a request not heard anything back yet? I sent a request on October 7th, and re-sent it again (indicating that it was the same request) on the 15th after Louisa posted; I didn't know if they were reading requests from before the 15th. I haven't heard anything at all yet. Did I commit a fatal faux pas by writing in English? I'm trying to be patient, but the suspense is killing me.