Ferran Adrià

There are 365 days a year. There's always a day for everything. There's even a day for McDonalds. . At least, there's a day to check what they're up to.

This year hasn’t been particularly focused on travels. Not gastronomically, at least. To mention Asia is almost a platitude, but you can’t take your eyes off it. Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, all that area has a very interesting cuisine. The great cuisine to rediscover is that of Islamic countries. I don’t know why nobody is interested in it when it’s been the beginning of what today we understand as cooking. We know very little of the Islamic world. Generally speaking, we know very little of almost everything. The lack of gastronomic culture of many chefs, I included, is unbelievable. If you ask me to name five dishes from Peruvian cuisine, I couldn’t name them.

I believe that now it's the time of chefs rather than national cuisines. It's more important that Frank Gehry is Frank Gehry than if he's Canadian. My feelings are Spanish and Catalonian, that's my mindset. I rarely cook with ingredients outside of a radius of 100kms around elBulli.

It's always tough to talk about colleagues. It's complicated, since I have many friends and I don't want to forget any of them. If you ask me what I would like to copy, that would be the sensitivity of Tetsuya Wakuda. I have seven or eight great chefs that I very much admire. From the last generation, Heston Blumenthal, without any question, will bring us emotions in the next twenty years. Beside combinations, a day will come when it'll be extremely hard to create something new.

Interesting question, Bill. If you don't know a technique, you're going to be surprised: you're surprised the first time you eat sushi. That doesn't mean that sushi is bad or the technique interferes. But the first time, your attention would probably be focused on the technique and the process. The first time you eat the spheric ravioli of pea, it has a wonderful taste of, well, pea. But you're surprised by the technique. Once you get used to the technique, you start re-focusing again on the taste and "discount" what the technique brings to the dish.

Creativity in cooking is just one of the many paths that exist. You can be happy eating a simple baguette, a simple sandwich, with the best bread and the best ibérico in the world. Othe thing is the value that a professional would attach to that. That is, you have to distinguish when you speak as a diner and when you speak as a chef. There are completely different positions. Perhaps we should ask ourselves what a gastronomic experience is, and without any doubt, we all have ours. Another thing I don’t get is this never ending question to creativity in cooking: it looks to me that it is the only field in the society where creativity is questioned. In the rest of the fields, we always ask for more investigation and R&D. There’s something that has to be clear. There are very few restaurants, truly very few restaurants, where research cooking is done. There’s a second wave, that rely on that research and that we could call creative cooking. After this, there’s another state that is a general use of some techniques and some concepts. Being creative is almost impossible because of its costs. It looks like having a lab is the most normal thing in the world. Our lab, elTaller where I’m right now, costs 300K€ per year. Very few restaurants could face that cost. Let’s don’t take this in a frivolous way and make things look like if they were 2,000 restaurants doing research in the world. Probably, you could count them with your hand. That doesn’t mean that there are people with creative minds that are doing interesting things. But research is extremely expensive and we’re at the beginning of the journey.

I’m already happy about the recognition I’ve got, from people and from colleagues. Above all because my country has also granted that recognition to me, something that isn’t always the case. I’m 42 and my ego is already fulfilled. More front covers are not going to change my life. I cook to have fun. How would I like to be remembered? As a person who intended to share what he did, who did his best not to complicate life to others and who hated others complicating his life.

The requirements are quite simple: open and positive minded. Otherwise, we would be questioning caviar because is black and round. So, you can see that I'm not asking very much.

The restaurant is the link with people. It would be very sad to create just for us. It's the restaurant what makes this whole thing human. The creative thing goes on all the year round. The difference is that in elTaller the dishes are not "finished", whereas at elBulli dishes have to be finished, complete.

The problem with taste transcends by far the fields of cooking and cuisine. It’s a matter so subjective that it all comes down to your opinion and my opinion. When I taste something and I affirm “this tastes to asparagus”, it’s just my opinion. Someone can deny it. Regarding textures, I can make an asparagus soup which will taste more like an asparagus than the actual product. This is my dream, and sometimes I get it. Many people have a wrong perception about what is pursued through texture changes. Not everything is wrong with people who follow my path. There are people in Spain, doing long tasting menus amazingly. Ten years ago or so, we were almost nothing culinarily speaking. Now, everyone is looking at us. I’d say that I have to do something with that.

Robert, my friend, how are you? I'm quite tired of being charged with only what doesn't work in avant garde cooking. I don't get compliments about the youngsters I've influenced and succeed. It looks like that only contemporary cuisine can be wrongly executed. Contemporary cuisine, as traditional cuisine or any other cuisine, there are people who execute it well and other who don’t. But I don’t know of a better equipped generation than this. The elbullinitis could only be solved with new techniques, new concepts, new philosophies created by other chefs, as it's happening lately. I'm the first interested in having a plurality of cuisines, but we all have to understand that when a new technique is discovered in medicine by a doctor, other doctors apply it. It’s normal and nothing happens. The problem previous to El Bulli books, was that there wasn't a proper documentation to know what and why. Now many young chefs are understanding things that were not that clear a few years ago. PS: Why does no one complain about bad traditional cooking?

There's a common misunderstanding about elBulli's kitchen: people think it's like the NASA. But except for a few tools like the Pacojet, the rest are quite common. Siphons have been around for many, many, years. It's the idea of how to give them a new use that matters.

We get something between 2,000 and 3,000 requests per year to stage at elBulli. Albert Raurich is responsible for doing the selection. Nowadays, experience is important to get the most of the six months you'd be with us. Oh!, the language in the kitchen is Spanish. Sort of.

You have to get by with what's available, though I don't like to think about what could had been, but on what can it be. The Thermomix can be replaced by a good blender and the Pacojet, leaving iced dust and a few thing more aside, by an ice cream machine. The Pacojet, above all, what give us is convenience.

Not only am I proud of Toni because of his success, but anyone who's been at elBulli and has success is a motive of joy and pride for all of us. Anthony and Olga are both exceptional people.

¡Hola, Víctor! Having in mind that only a part of my cuisine is deconstruction and that I hardly used deconstruction techniques in 2004, I agree that the great challenge would imply to revolutionize the world of meat and fish (not shellfish (marisco)). The revolution would be to think of a new cuisine with a big piece of fish, or with a tenderloin steak. If we analyze the Nouvelle Cuisine codified by Guérard or Troisgros, we haven’t evolved that much conceptually speaking: new products have been incorporated to our repertoire, new saucing concepts. But the foundation of product + garnish + sauce has hardly varied. What has truly changed is dish harmony. If you analyze the cuisine I’ve been doing since 1996, you’ll notice that there are few dishes of meat and almost none around a big piece of fish. There’s a lot of seafood, a lot of vegetables and fruits, some deconstructed dishes and many not deconstructed. That said, this is the big challenge. I see it quite difficult: you can’t do too much to a large piece of sea base. That’s why, with meat dishes, I feel more at ease with offal, with small things, than with bigger things.

The big revolution yet to be made is that haute cuisine chefs come in domestic cooking, not that which we cook at our restaurants. It’s important to change the mindset. You can’t think of cooking at home what you cook at elBulli, where you have forty cooks. I’ve written books of how to cook in then minutes, DVDs and I love the philosophical aspect of this question. For instance, the selection of ingredients: it’s always advisable to use a very good sardine instead of a not that good lobster. I always try to view domestic cooking through a prism of logic and common sense, linked to natural products. It’s simply not worth it to invest a lot of time and effort to make aromatic oil by yourself, when you can buy a very good one. But don’t use frozen vegetables (perhaps peas would be an exception to the rule.)

Hi, there: Reservations are simple: 8,000 seats a year, thousands and thousands who want to come. How many? It’s almost impossible to know. But there are thousands and thousands. So there’s no way to keep up with the demand. It's our worse "disgrace". No matter how hard we try, we don't find a fair way to handle them. I don't know anything about reservations, Juli some of them and Luis García, who's elBulli's manager, is the one who handles this matter. I totally trust Luis's honesty. There would be an easy solution for this: increase prices, but Juli and I don't want to convert elBulli into the most expensive place only affordable to some very rich people. Right now, we’re not at elBulli because of the money, we’re there because we love cooking. And we want to find unassuming couples in the dining room. We don’t want anybody to believe that elBulli is a place for VIPS. Juli and I make a very residual use of our influence. Blind, I don't have any tricks for you, but if you have any suggestion about this, let us know.

I just wanted to drop by and see how things were going. In a couple of days, I'll have more time to address your questions. In the meantime, let me propose this subject to you and read what you think about it: Does the ideal gastronomy exist or is it the gastronomy of every one of us? Hablamos . . .