Beyond elBulli

[robert brown]

Ferran, I tell people I am not an aficionado of degustation menus, but that the only restaurant where it truly works is elBulli. This seems to me to be part of a larger phenomenon that your cuisine is so idiosyncratic that it, too, only seems to work as it unfolds at elBulli. It's hard to encounter your influences elsewhere and not make a comparison between the chef whose dish I am eating and yourself. Might you be the culinary equivalent of Jackson Pollock or Charlie Parker; someone whose production is such a leap forward that every chef you inspire can't help being thought of as a copier?

[Ferran Adrià]

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?

Edited December 20, 2004 by Ferran Adrià (log)