Ferran Adrià
“PART OF WHAT WE WANT IS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND HOW CREATIVITY WORKS.”
THE GREAT CHEF— perhaps the greatest of all time—stands at the kitchen pass, his hair an unruly halo, his gaze as intense as ever. Outside, the pale March sun still sets the Spanish Mediterranean to sparkling; the ancient pines still hold their ground against the tramontane winds that blow south across the Pyrenees from France and down the headland to the cove at Cala Montjoi. But inside there is no longer a team of 45 cooks working in silent precision over their tasks, no fragile spherified olives being coaxed onto spoons, or coconut milk “dinosaur eggs” trailing liquid nitrogen smoke. Instead, there is only rubble. Making himself an espresso from the one piece of equipment not covered in a thick layer of dust, the chef notices my expression. “You’re emotional because you’re thinking about what it was,” he says. “But I’m thinking about what it’s about to become.”
Ferran Adrià has been thinking about what elbulli will become for a long while now. When in 2011 he closed the restaurant that many consider the most influential of our time, in order to reopen it as a kind of culinary think tank, he could not have imagined the obstacles to come. It’s only now, three years late and a little battered, that his vision is finally becoming reality.
“It’s not about gastronomy,” Adrià says, as he steps outside to observe the construction that is transforming his former restaurant into elbulli 1846, a research lab and exhibition space. (The name derives from the number of recipes elbulli developed between 1983 and 2011.) “It’s about innovation in general. Gastronomy is just the platform we’re using to explore innovation.”
As an innovation lab, elbulli 1846 will host projects that, more than simply generating new ideas, are intended to improve the efficiency of the creative process. “Part of what we want to do is to better understand how creativity works,” Adrià says in his trademark staccato English. “Is it better to work alone or in teams? For long periods or in short bursts? There’s more to creativity than waking up and saying, ‘Ooh, I have an idea.’”
Those projects will be conducted by interdisciplinary teams composed of a changing roster of experts from cuisine, the arts, psychology, com- munications and design—the “most creative of the creative,” as Adrià puts it. The lab will measure itself by the quality of the people who come out of it. “If every five years, two or three really worldclass leaders in their field emerge from their time here, that’ll be our success.”
Although Adrià emphasizes that elbulli 1846 is not a “place for pleasure; it’s a place for work,” it will also be open to the public as an exhibition space. And about 20 times a year, the site will
host “experiences,” mostly for donors but occasionally by lottery for the public. What’s an experience? “Maybe it’ll be a chance to try some of the things that the lab has been working on,” he says. “Maybe it’ll be about Dalí, and you’ll start at the [Dalí] museum in Sitges, then come up here by boat and have snacks on the beach. We’ve got 200 ideas for experiences. They could be anything.” Anything, that is, except a restaurant. Although the experiences may include meals, ordinary visitors will not be able to purchase food. “Not even a hot dog. The expectations would be too high. We’d be back where we were before.”
In those words lurk echoes of the pressures that led Adrià and his late partner, Juli Soler, to close the restaurant. At the time, speculation about their motives included everything from financial ruin to physical exhaustion, but in truth, the decision sprang from the sense that the demands of running a restaurant were preventing elbulli from fully giving itself over to what Adrià now saw as its—as his—true mission. “I never loved running a kitchen,” he says. “What I thrived on was the creativity. But a restaurant is about artisanal reproduction—you have to do something over and over. And when you reproduce something, the excitement of the creative moment gets lost.”
By the time of elbulli’s farewell party, Adrià and Soler had the funds in place to launch a foundation— slated to open in 2014—that would allow them to pursue that excitement full time. It didn’t take long, however, for the obstacles to emerge. The original blueprints didn’t dedicate enough space to house elbulli’s extensive archive. A second set of plans provoked the ire of environmentalists, who presented a petition before parliament charging that Adrià would be using protected land (elbulli is located within a national park) “for his own personal gain.” Adrià lost both his parents and his mother-in-law; then, in 2015, Soler died. “There have definitely been moments,” he says, “when I didn’t know if we could continue.”
But the delays have allowed Adrià and his team to fill in the details of a plan that, if less architecturally ambitious, is also less vague in its goals. And the brushes with mortality have induced him to think more about legacy. “Almost nothing survives more than 100 years. We’re thinking in terms of 50. I’ll be here for as long as I live. But in 50 years, after I’m gone, it will become a museum.”
First, though, elbulli 1846 has to open. Today, Adrià has gathered for the first time his entire permanent team at the site, so that they might start thinking about how the interior spaces should be arranged and outfitted. As they make their way gingerly across the torn-up floor of what was once the auxiliary kitchen, where staff meals were prepared, Adrià reminds them of what lies ahead. “We closed as a restaurant because we couldn’t go any further. Here,” he says, “there are no limits.”