Ferran Adria

Ferran Adrià Acosta (Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, May 14, 1962) is a Spanish chef who revolutionized the world of gastronomy and ushered it into a new era. The American magazine Time included Adrià in the list of the 100 most innovative people in the world in 2004. Until 2011, Adrià was chef and co-owner of the now-defunct Spanish restaurant El Bulli (Cala Montjoi, Girona). which throughout its history has received the highest gastronomic distinctions, including the Best Restaurant in the World in the ranking The World's 50 Best Restaurants prepared by the British magazine Restaurant, or the S. Pellegrino Award for four consecutive years; something that no other establishment has achieved so far.

Professional biography

Also known, especially in his early days, as Fernando Adrián, he completed his basic studies in Barcelona and planned to continue studying. During those years he lived with his family: Ginés Adrià, Josefa Acosta and his brother Albert Adrià.

• 1980 He left the studios and got a job as a dishwasher at the small Hotel Playafels in Castelldefels, where he started in the classic kitchen.

• 1981-1982 He went to work in Ibiza. When he returned to Barcelona he held several places in restaurants, until he entered the Finisterre restaurant, working until he had to go to military service. There he was part of Captain General's kitchen equipment.

• 1983 From the middle of 1982 until the end of 1983, Ferran Adrià made the military service in the Marina in Cartagena. During the summer of 1983, following a suggestion from another recruit, he decided to spend his month of permission in El Bulli, a restaurant he had not heard of until then. After this month and, in view of the successful experience, Ferran has already sponsored his entry into staff for the following year.

El Bulli's Kitchen.

• 1984 After a stay at a restaurant in Seville, Ferran entered El Bulli as head of departure in March 1984. Since then his career would be joined to El Bulli. In August, Jean-Paul Vinay reported that in October he left El Bulli to set up a restaurant in Barcelona. In October, Ferran and Christian became heads of kitchen.

Ferran and Christian, during the months of October, November, December and January reorganized their future plans. The holidays, the two chefs visited other restaurants within their economic possibilities. In 1984 there was the first professional trip to France, where they ate at the restaurant of Lucien Vanel in Toulouse. Later, on a later trip with Dr. Schilling, they were able to visit large restaurants of high French cuisine.

• 1985 Ferran was with chefs Georges Blanc and Jacques Pic. One of the most important visits that were made in those months was the one that took them to the restaurant Currito, in Madrid, where they would get the idea for the pear peanuts in scabeche. His brother Albert Adrià joined the Bulli's pastry.

• 1987 In early 1987 they visit the Côte d'Azur to visit some prestigious restaurants in the area. In a sample for the Escoffier Foundation in Cannes, on the tertulia that happened to this demonstration, one of the attendees asked the great French chef Jacques Maximin what was creativity. Maximin replied: "Creativity is not copying". This phrase was the one that led to the change of attitude in his kitchen and marked the passage from “recreation” to a firm will to influence creativity.

Until the winter of 1986, El Bulli remained closed for two months (from 15 January to 15 March). Since 1987, the closing period was extended to five months, from mid-October to mid-March. Later the five months passed to six (from 1 October to 1 April). They barely had customers in that period, so keeping the restaurant open meant losing money. What was in principle a necessity, then became a fundamental feature in El Bulli. Without these months of closure it would be impossible to maintain the level of creation. In January 1987, Christian Lutaud left El Bulli to set up another restaurant. This made Adrià have to make decisions for the first time alone in the kitchen and gave her her own style with full freedom.

• 1990 This year there are new challenges: going beyond guide Michelin. Now he's interested in the magazine. Gault & Millau, founded by Henri Gault and Christian Millau, who had supported and named the nouvelle cuisine. Thanks to her, she knows the existence of two chefs considered the most avant-garde of the moment, Michel Bras and Pierre Gagnaire and decides to go to know her kitchen. In 1994 he invents a dish that creates a new style: the "mester of vegetables in textures". This trip marked his way of understanding the kitchen. De Gagnaire learn that “everything is possible”. With Bras they discover the sensitivity, nature, respect for the taste of each product. This marked him with great enthusiasm and began to alternate the indigenous style with another more avant-garde and without roots.

• 1999 In June 1999, The Weekly Country he dedicates his cover and a comprehensive report on the inside, entitled "Ferran Adrià, the best cook in the world". It was the first time that his restaurant appeared on the front line in all the Spanish kiosks.

• 2003-2004 In 2003 Ferran Adrià occupies the cover and fourteen inner pages of the Sunday supplement The New York Times. Shortly thereafter, in 2004, the supplement Le Monde he dedicates his cover and an interior article to Ferran. The magazine Time it was listed among the 100 most influential personalities in the world in all spheres. All this significantly boosted the public projection of Ferran Adrià and El Bulli.

• 2004 That year his collaboration with the scientific world made another leap forward thanks to the Fundación Alicia, of Caixa Manresa and the Generality of Catalonia that is dedicated to food and science (its name comes from Food and Science), that is, to everything related to food processes, health and gastronomy, from a social point of view and with scientific foundations and methods. Project in which they participate very closely and whose headquarters, located in the monastery of San Benito de Bages, opened its doors in 2007. He intends to carry out work not purely scientific, but social and cultural, with programs for better food and studies to better understand the history of food and gastronomy.

• 2005 The José Cela University of Madrid creates the Ferran Adrià Chair, which is defined as "Gastronomical culture and food sciences". Provide courses on food security, nutrition, food composition, taste education or creativity in cooking, among others. Thus, the kitchen finally reaches the University, something relevant to the future, especially in the theoretical field. Thanks to the evolutionary analysis books written by El Bulli's team, their participation will be relevant.

• 2006 This year, El Bulli is chosen for the second time best restaurant in the world by the magazine The Restaurant Magazine, by a jury composed on this occasion by 500 critics, cooks and gourmets from around the world. In Madrid Fusion, sixty journalists from different countries and specialized in gastronomy produce a list with the most influential chefs in the last ten years, headed by Ferran Adrià.

• 2007 Ferran Adrià is appointed Doctor Honoris Causa, in December 2007, by the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Barcelona, a distinction until then unpublished: never before has a chef been granted. For the third time and for the second consecutive year, the magazine The Restaurant Magazine awards the best restaurant in the world to El Bulli, by a jury composed of more than five hundred specialists. Two new books dealing with El Bulli are published under the titles One day at the Bulliwhich collects daily life in the restaurant in 24 hours, and The Bulli from the inside, biography of a restaurant, a personal vision of the story of El Bulli by the writer Xavier Moret with which he won the Premio Sent Soví de Literatura Gastronomy in 2006.

The exhibition of contemporary art Documentary 12, in Kassel, invites Ferran Adrià to participate in it, making El Bulli, from Cala Montjoi, become the G Pavilion of the exhibition, raise a debate on the non-movable artistic disciplines. Each day, during the 100 days of Documenta, two people went to dinner from Kassel to serve as a link between the two headquarters, Kassel and Cala Montjoi.

• 2008. For the fourth time and for the third consecutive year, the magazine The Restaurant Magazine awarded the award to the best restaurant in the world to El Bulli, by a jury composed of more than five hundred specialists. He received an Honoris Causa Doctorate in Aberdeen, on the proposal of Professor Christopher Fynsk, of the Centre for Modern Thought. Fynsk compares Adrià with Picasso and Miró for their transcendence in their creative discipline, and points out that it is “a thinker intended to renew the connection between intellectual food and sensory food”.

Publication A day at El Bulli, in Phaidon, an editorial specializing in art books, and in several languages. It's a new version of One day in El Bulli, with content expansion that explains the creative processes of the restaurant.

• 2009 For the fifth and fourth consecutive year, the magazine The Restaurant Magazine awards the best restaurant in the world to El Bulli.

• 2010 At the Madrid Fusion gastronomic summit, Ferran Adrià publicly announced that his restaurant, El Bulli, will remain closed to the public for two years, 2012 and 2013, although it will remain open as a research workshop. During this period, Adrià will work with her team in two creative centers: elBullitaller on Portaferrissa street in Barcelona and Bulli himself, in Cala Montjoi. Starting in 2014 The Bulli will become a foundation dedicated to boosting gastronomic creativity.

Adrià is expected to teach, from September to December 2010, a course at Harvard University (USA) within the activities of the Fundació ALImentació i CiènCIA, known as Alícia.

In October, Adrià announced an alliance with Telefónica and became the corporate ambassador of this multinational telecommunications company, which in turn backs it on numerous projects like Telefónica. The Bullipedia.

• 2013 On June 26, 2013 Ferran Adrià announced in the program The tingling that had entered as an investor partner in the startup trip4real. The same month of July El País announced in an article that Ferran Adrià had invested in the tourism company. During the month of November 2013, the renowned chef launched a campaign along with trip4real in which he announced that they were looking for 1000 microentrepreneurs.
• In 2013 he was in charge of the celebrations of the Mercè, in which he paid tribute to the Catalan gastronomy and recognized the importance of the restoration sector.

Creativity

Green tea.

Aceituna liquid de Ferran Adrià.

He is considered a kitchen artist, in which he has introduced new techniques, such as deconstruction, decontextualizing this concept from the world of art (consisting of isolating the various ingredients of a dish, generally typical, and reconstruct it in an unusual way, in such a way that the appearance and texture are completely different while the flavor remains unchanged), the foams (which he creates using siphons), the spherification (use of alginates to form small balls of liquid content) as well as the use of liquid nitrogen.

Apart from these techniques, Ferran Adrià's cuisine stands out for the minimalism of its presentation, the use of highly innovative crockery and utensils, as well as its break with many classic cooking principles.^{[citation required ]} For example, frozen savory dishes or desserts with elements that until now were exclusive to savory dishes. In addition, according to El Bulli's philosophy, all foods have the same culinary value despite their different prestige or price. In Ferran Adrià's kitchen there is no predominance of expensive raw materials such as foie gras, lobster or caviar.

Some of his most emblematic creations and, at the same time, good examples of the aforementioned techniques are: the textured stew (an example of deconstruction), oysters with carrot air, fake melon caviar, marrow with caviar and the different nitro coulants (variations of the emblematic coulants by Michel Bras using liquid nitrogen). In addition, he has been associated with the creation of the deconstructed potato omelette, although as the chef himself has recognized, this did not come out of his kitchen.

Ferran Adrià has a number of former collaborators and disciples, among whom Sergi Arola stands out individually (among others La Broche, less in line with the work of Ferran Adrià) and José Ramón Andrés Puerta (cook based in the US and popular television presenter in Spain).

El Bulli

The Bulli Restaurant.

"El Bulli" restaurant entrance.

El Bulli was the gastronomic temple of Adrià. It was located in the northeast of Spain, in Cala Montjoi, in Rosas (Gerona, Spain). Distinguished with three stars Michelin Guide, it was considered the best restaurant in the world in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

The enormous international success of El Bulli, coupled with the fact that it was only open half the year and offered only one meal a day, meant that it was difficult to reserve a table. Each year, only a total of about 8,000 people were able to eat at the establishment.

Despite the enormous demand and the high prices, the enormous costs (the client-staff ratio was low) and the limited number of services meant that El Bulli gave little profit. This was compensated through various business activities in the gastronomic world: the Hacienda Benazuza hotel and restaurant, consultancies in restaurants and various companies, publication of books or conferences, following a business model similar to that of other French chefs.

Bulli is a pet word for bulldogs in Germany. The founder of El Bulli, Marketta Schilling, had several of these dogs and that is why she named them that way.

The pedagogy of Adrià and El Bulli

He considers Juan Mari Arzak to be his teachers and references to nouvelle cuisine in France and in Spain. But Adrià soon went from student to teacher. Chefs who have later stood out in the culinary world such as Andoni Luis Aduriz, Joan Roca, Paco Roncero, Elena Arzak, José Andrés and Sergi Arola have passed through the kitchens of El Bulli.

At El Bulli there were about 40 people working in the kitchen and it received about 5,000 applications a year to enter training and work.

Awards, recognitions and distinctions

El Bulli has been chosen as the best restaurant in the world for several years. Time magazine has included Ferran Adrià in its list of the hundred most influential people in the world.

List of awards, distinctions and prizes awarded to Ferran Adrià and El Bulli.

Qualification in gastronomic guides

• Three stars in the Michelin guide.
• 5 Gasolineras en la Campsa Guide.
• 3 soles in the Repsol Guide.
• 9,75 in the Gourmetour Guide.
• 9,75 in the Guide The Best of Gastronomy by Rafael García Santos.

Acknowledgments

• 1999 Cover in the magazine The Weekly Country.
• 2003 President of the Bocuse d'Or.
• Cover in the newspaper magazine The New York TimesAugust 10th.
• 2004 Cover in the Sunday newspaper Le Monde, which represents the highest recognition for the first world gastronomy.
• Cover of the magazine Timeconsidering Ferran Adrià as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
• The Spanish Royal House chooses Ferran Adrià with Juan Mari Arzak, for the preparation of the gala dinner offered to the royal families of the world, the night before the liaison of Prince Philip and Doña Letizia.
• Ferran Adrià, chairs the Advisory Committee of Alicia (Food and Science). Caixa de Manresa project at the monastery of San Benito de Bages. This is a unique project, which works for better food in the future.
• The Spanish Renamed Brands Forum appoints him Ambassador of the Spanish Brand in the category of Culture together with Juan Antonio Samaranch, Amancio Ortega, José Carreras, El PaísSeveriano Ballesteros and Valentí Fuster.
• 2005 The Ferran Adrià Chair of Gastronomic Culture and Food Sciences is created at the José Cela University of Madrid.
• 2007 In Madrid Fusion, 60 journalists from around the world set a list of the Ten most influential chefs of the last ten years, and chose Ferran Adrià in the first place.
• 2007 On June 16, the exhibition of Art Documenta 12 was opened, to which Ferran Adrià was invited. The intervention is to turn the Bulli restaurant, in Cala Montjoi, into the Documenta G Pavilion, which is a response to the contextualization of the world of cutting-edge cuisine in the art world.
• In December, the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Barcelona awarded to Ferran Adrià the doctorate Honoris Causa, on the proposal of Professor Claudi Mans.
• 2008 In the month of February two films inspired by the career of Ferran Adrià are shown at the Berlinale Film Festival in the section on culinary cinema. Ferran participates in a debate in this framework.
• The University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, on the proposal of Professor Christopher Fynsk, of the Centre for Modern Thought of this institution, awarded the Doctorate Honoris Causa in Humanities to Ferran Adrià, whom he compared, for his influence, with Picasso and Miró.
• Gran Cruz de la Orden del Mérito Civil, granted by the Council of Ministers of Spain and proposed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recognizes the civil merits of persons who have provided services relevant to the State with extraordinary works, profitable initiatives or with exemplary record in the performance of their duties.
• Order of the rising Sun, with Golden Rays and Rosetta (2015).

Controversies

The national and international impact of Ferran Adrià has also generated criticism of his way of understanding gastronomy. Adrià denounced the chef with 3 Michelin stars Santi Santamaria, who described his way of understanding cooking as "pretentious". Santamaria attacked Adrià's dishes at El Bulli as unhealthy, claiming that "Adrià's dishes are designed to impress rather than satisfy and use chemicals that put the health of the dishes at risk." He criticized the use of additives and molecular gastronomy present in Adrià's dishes. Many prestigious chefs, however, accused Santamaria of envy and of "endangering the reputation of Spanish kitchens". The controversy has divided Spain. the most prestigious Spanish chefs among those who support Adrià's methods and those who are against. Some of the criticized dishes include the sweet and sour frozen whiskey, white garlic and almond sorbet, tobacco-flavored blackberry and Kellogg's paella.;s (rice krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla flavored mashed potatoes). German culinary writer Jörg Zipprick accused Adrià of poisoning his customers with the additives he uses in his cooking and said Adrià's menu should carry health warnings: "These colourings, gelling agents, emulsifiers, acidifiers and flavor enhancers that Adrià has massively introduced into his dishes to obtain extraordinary textures, flavors and sensations that do not have a neutral impact on health."

Adrià in television and cinema

The popularity of Ferran Adrià has meant that he has been parodied by comedians and comedy shows, such as:

• PolòniaTV3.
• Girl Nui.
• The news of the scriptwhere he had his own script.
• Matt Groening's cartoon, which has served as a cover for one of his books.
• In 2013, Ferran Adrià participated as a special guest in the program of MasterChef (Spain) (cociners contest), where he had to decide, together with the other three jurors who would win that program.
• In 2019 he participates in the sixth episode of the first season of the series Foodie Love, directed by Isabel Coixet for HBO Spain.

He has also made a cameo in the animated film Ratatouille, which takes place in Paris and is set in the world of haute cuisine, voicing one of the characters, a fussy restaurant customer. a restaurant.

Published Works

• The Bulli 1983-1993 (with Juli Soler and Albert Adrià).
• The Bulli: the taste of the Mediterranean, 1993, ISBN 84-7596-415-X.
• The Secrets of El Bulli, 1997, ISBN 448710002.
• The Bulli 1994-1997 (with Juli Soler and Albert Adrià).
• Cook in 10 minutes with Ferran Adrià, 1998, ISBN 84-605-7628-0.
• Celebrate the millennium with Arzak and Adrià (with Juan Mari Arzak), 1999, ISBN 84-8307-246-7.
• The Bulli 1998-2002 (with Juli Soler and Albert Adrià), Conran Octopus, 2003, ISBN 1-84091-346-0; Ecco, 2005, ISBN 0-06-081757-7.
• The Bulli 2003-2004 (with Juli Soler and Albert Adrià), Ecco, 2006, ISBN 0-06-114668-4.
• FOOD for thought THOUGHT for food (El Bulli y Ferran Adrià), 2009 Actar Editorial, ISBN 978-84-96954-68-7.
• Eat to think. Thinking to eat2009.
• Family Food, 2011, ISBN 9788492981823.
• Write the prologue of "The Winner Effect" by Aitor Carmona, 2016, Avant Editorial.