Ferran Adrià, The Cook Who Shared
Did you know that the restaurants were created during the French Revolution? In these days most of the chefs worked for the court of Louis XVI in France. When the court dissolved during the struggle all these cooks became unemployed. To earn their living they began to cook for other people: restaurants were born.
This was one of the stories the Spanish culinary legend Ferrán Adrià shared with the audience during the presentation of his new book, “The Family Meal” at George Washington University in DC. Accompanied by chef José Andrés, he gave several lessons as “It’s impossible to know everything about cooking” (only in the Amazon there are more than 400 types of fruit, can you imagine how many different plates?), and “it’s important to be good at every step”. For the funniest one he looked in the audience for a woman with a miniskirt to ask who invented that type of clothing. When someone gave the name of the designer Mary Quant, he jokingly corrected that, even with their hairy legs, Romans were the first to wear miniskirts. Quant only invented the concept, and “this is what we chefs do, we create concepts”.
Adrià also explained the future of El Bulli, the very prestigious restaurant in Roses, Gerona, where in 1983 he began working as a dishwasher, “a very important task because if they get ill, the cook has to clean the dishes. El Bulli, was nominated several years in a row as the best restaurant in the world while he was the chef. However, he realized that all that success wasn’t perfect when his mother, after reading in a newspaper that he received another award, commented “You again?!”. So, he thought, “if my mother thinks that about me what will my foes think”. Therefore, in January 2009 he decided to create a new project: The Bulli Foundation, a sort of think-tank for cooking creators with cuisine as a language. The kitchen will be a workshop for experimentation and it will welcome each year 15 chefs from all over the world and 8 “agitators” that should foster the most effective creativity. All their creations will be shared on-line everyday and in 2014 all the archives will be translated and available around the world.
Ferrán Adrià didn’t use deconstructions, liquid nitrogen or spherification in this talk, but friendliness. He taught that creativity is a way of living, an attitude that should be shared. “I don’t want to be perfect, I want to astonish”, he confessed. And at the end more than 1500 people stood up and applauded.
