As El Bulli evolved and became more and more successful, it became less and less accessible. At each stage, pushing the boundaries of cuisine required a respite from the demands of running a restaurant. Viewed from this perspective, closing the restaurant is the final stage in its creative evolution. The pressure of customers, the spectacular disparity between the supply of seats and the hordes of people who wanted them, seemed to have reached a kind of tipping point. Ferran’s a friendly and gregarious man who travels extensively in the off-season, and everyone he meets, sooner or later, will ask for a reservation for himself or a friend or a friend of a friend. And Ferran hates to say no, though he claims to have no problem turning away celebrities. “Only if it’s somebody I really admire,” he said. “I don’t really care about movie stars. I want this to be a democratic place.” For this reason he refused to charge what the market would bear; 250 euros a head isn’t cheap, but he could charge triple that and still fill the place ten times over. “It’s an affordable luxury.” But he realized the result wasn’t so much a democracy as a nepotocracy; chefs seemed to form no small part of the clientele, plus friends of friends. When I ran into a Williams classmate in the dining room, I asked how he’d gotten in, and he explained that his girlfriend worked in a museum whose director was a friend of Ferran’s.
In 2014, El Bulli will reopen under a different format, one that probably won’t accommodate paying customers. “It will be kind of a think tank,” Adrià said. “Not a school exactly, but a foundation. A private nonprofit foundation.” He still seemed to be improvising, refining the concept. “We’ll have twenty-five people here, chefs, two or three journalists, tech people. At the end of the day our work will be posted on the Internet. We will collaborate with the world of art and design. It will not be a restaurant. No Michelin, no customers, no pressure. Every year will be different.”
“There aren’t enough professionals dedicated to analysis and research,” he said, drumming the table in front of us. “This is work that people are doing at universities. Cuisine is entering a new phase. There will be cooking at Harvard.” I would have scoffed at this notion if I hadn’t already read that Adrià was going to teach at Harvard that fall, presiding over a course called Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter. The course would bring together Harvard science profs and top chefs like Adrià, his friend Jose Andrés, Wylie Dufresne of wd~50, and Dan Barber of Blue Hill.
“Cooking provides an ideal framework to study a variety of complex phenomena—from basic chemistry to materials science to applied physics,” according to the physics professor David A. Weitz, one of the organizers of the course. “Much of what we do in the lab is what chefs like Ferran Adrià are now doing in their kitchens.” (In fact, El Bulli’s kitchen looked like a lab, with thirty-odd chefs and stagiaires in pristine whites lined up on either side of several spotless stainless steel cooking surfaces. There wasn’t a flame in sight, and just three hours before the first seating the atmosphere was strangely calm and focused.) The Harvard course grew out of a hugely popular one-night stand in 2008, when Adrià spoke to an overflow Harvard audience about such subjects as the use of hydrocolloids that allow delicate fruit or vegetable purees to be transformed into a dense gel, and techniques like spherification, creating a resistant skin of liquid—like my spherical martini olive.
Having never finished high school, Adrià seemed tremendously proud of the Harvard connection—and of the honorary degrees from several Spanish universities. He also seemed to value his invitation to participate in the 2007 Documenta, the quinquennial art fair in Kassel, Germany. Rather than performing or speaking at the fair, Adrià decided to make El Bulli a pavilion, albeit one some eight hundred miles away from Kassel. Every day two festivalgoers were invited to travel to Cala Montjoi, have dinner, and write about the experience; these collected essays, along with assorted photographs and documents, were published as Food for Thought, Thought for Food. The selection of Adrià was not without controversy, some doubting that cooking and art were coextensive. But he himself is proud that the question’s been raised. “The word ‘artist’ can’t and shouldn’t be used in respect to chefs,” said Tony Bourdain, “with very few exceptions. Ferran Adrià is, without a doubt, an artist. I always find myself comparing Ferran to musicians—rather than other chefs. People like Jimi Hendrix … or Charlie Parker, who heard notes, heard music, where others heard nothing. Who made noises come out of their instruments that no one else had ever dreamed possible. I don’t know—but suspect—that Ferran, like Hendrix, like Parker, might find it a burden year after year to be that far out in front of everybody else. I can’t imagine what that pressure might be like.”
I’m not entirely certain whether what Adrià creates is art, but I can say that dining at El Bulli was a truly extraordinary aesthetic experience. I felt more than a little like Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. I’d worried that the meal would be too intellectual to be genuinely enjoyable—a rap that one hears against Adrià, especially from those who have never eaten here—but in fact it was a hedonistic revel, at once a feast and a mind game, Dionysus and Apollo wrestling on the plate, the senses ultimately triumphing over the brain in the end. At each stage it seemed hard to imagine how the kitchen could follow up on some particularly exquisite creation; yet the rhythm of the dinner felt perfect, the individual courses seeming to add up to something like a narrative, although it was definitely postmodern, rather than linear. There was a Japanese chapter of about seven courses, including the best miso soup I’ve ever tasted and ten iterations of soy on a single plate; another chapter focused on strictly local ingredients, including sea anemone and pine nuts. Sweet and savory elements alternated throughout. We sometimes couldn’t help laughing—beetroot cookie? Gorgonzola with chocolate?—though at other times we felt more like stout Cortés as described by Keats, stricken silent with wonder at the spectacle. And for brief moments I actually felt high, as if I’d ingested some fast-acting THC or psilocybin.
It would be interesting, if utterly improbable, to imagine the diner who arrived with neither preconceptions nor expectations. The unfussy, rustic Mediterranean decor of the dining room certainly couldn’t prepare you for what was about to come. Your fellow diners are a mixed bunch: two well-dressed young newlyweds from France; a middle-aged New York couple in black; a Spanish couple in jeans and T-shirts; two glamorous women accompanying much older men, both in white jeans and skimpy tops, speaking English, one blonde with a French accent, the other brunette with an Italian. You might sense a certain giddiness in the air. Many of the diners are brandishing cameras, and Juli Soler, the maître d’hôtel, volunteers to take pictures. There is no silverware on the table, only a white linen tablecloth.
And then that deconstructed martini arrives, followed by four more “cocktails,” including what looks like a strawberry made from frozen Campari, a gin fizz “snow,” and a hot-and-cold gin fizz. At some point a piece of sculpture appears, a wavy blond convoluted ribbon that looks like a model of a deconstructed Eames chair, which the waiter insists is corn bread—without doubt the most delicious I’ve ever tasted, crunchy, salty, and slightly sweet. That’s followed by something resembling a softball. The waiter cracks it open, the substance in question about as thick as a Christmas tree ornament, and sprinkles it with nutmeg. It’s a sphere of semi-frozen Gorgonzola.
My wife’s two favorite foods are bone marrow and oysters, but she never thought she’d eat them together, out of an oyster shell, or that the combination would be brilliant. Only a fanatic would try to match a wine to every course—though it’s apparently been done. Instead, we drink Champagne, which is what the chef has recommended, or rather we drink one bottle of Champagne, another of Cava, the sparkling wine associated with Catalonia. The latter is the 2004 Kripta Brut Nature Gran Reserva, a toasty, rich bubbly that reminded me more than a little of the slightly oxidative Krug style. It came in a great bottle with a rounded bottom and needed to be kept upright in an ice bucket.
The Champagne is one of my favorites, the VO from Anselme Selosse, the leading light of the small-grower movement. Although he recommends sparkling wine, Adrià himself favors beer. He consults for one of Spain’s biggest breweries and came up with the idea for a beer in an attractive wine-like bottle for the fine-restaurant trade. (Adrià consults for several major Spanish food and beverage corporations, which helps subsidize El Bulli.)
At some point we’re given a single honeysuckle blossom on a small plate and are instructed to pull off the stem and suck it. Again, we can’t help laughing. In fact we laugh through much of the meal. The honeysuckle teases forth memories of childhood; the nectar of the blossom, almost certainly enhanced, is far more intense than I remember it from those long-ago summers, though when I ask Ferran about it later, he is uncharacteristically cagey about what was actually in it. The marinated rose petals with artichoke foam are not a complete success; they tasted exactly the way roses smell, but I discovered that I don’t really like rose petals, and perhaps that’s a good thing to know. The sprig of marinated pine, on the other hand, is delicious. Since my last unpleasant experience eating a sprig of pine some forty-five years ago, back in the days when I tasted almost everything I encountered in a spirit of childish open-mindedness, I didn’t think I’d ever want to have one again, but I was wrong.
In the nights that followed my evening at El Bulli, I dined at two Michelin one-star restaurants in Barcelona, including one run by a disciple of Ferran’s, and I found myself disappointed to be back in the realm of conventional cuisine. It’s like climbing behind the wheel of a Camry after spending the day driving Ferraris at the company test track in Maranello. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it’s like returning to the present day after spending a few hours in some utopian future complete with antigravity and previously unimagined erogenous zones. This feeling gradually fades, thank God, and I’m able to enjoy retro food once again. But I can’t help hoping that Adrià changes his mind and that I get another chance to try whatever he’s up to. In the meantime, I comfort myself with the thought that much of what I otherwise eat will be greatly influenced by his work, past and future.
Epilogue
Travels with Lora
Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.
—M. F. K. Fisher
When I first met Lora Zarubin, I could never have imagined that we’d find ourselves locked in adjacent cells in the police station of a provincial French town at three in the morning. In fact I never thought I’d see her again after our disastrous first encounter, which took place in 1995 at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. My friend Dominique Browning had recently been appointed editor in chief of House & Garden, and she’d decided to ramp up the magazine’s coverage of food and wine. She’d already hired Lora as food editor, and Lora was quite adamant that there should be a regular wine column. Dominique, a longtime friend, knew this was a passion of mine and thought it would be interesting to have someone outside the field write about it. When she proposed me, Lora and some of the other editors were aghast. I was known, among other things, for writing about people who abused controlled substances, and I was written about in the New York gossip press as one of those very individuals, a monster of ego and excess. Lora found it hard to believe I knew much about wine. Certainly I had a reputation as a party animal; no one had ever accused me of being a connoisseur.
When we got together for lunch with Dominique, I confirmed all of her worst suspicions. The night before I’d been out until the wee hours with Bret Easton Ellis, and I was not, as we say of certain wines, showing very well. There in the Grill Room, surrounded by moguls sipping mineral water, I felt seriously misplaced and miscast. Mort Zuckerman, Mort Janklow, Martha Stewart, Henry Kissinger, and a downtown fuckup brat-pack novelist. Even on the best of days this wouldn’t have been my scene, or my hour to shine. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk about wine, much less drink it. My olfactory acuity was at a low point. However, I was eventually able to impress Lora a little, despite my condition, correctly guessing the provenance of a glass that was given to me blind, surprising myself perhaps even more than Lora. One would have to say her admiration was grudging at best, and I believe Dominique gave me the job over her protests, but suddenly we were colleagues. Neither one of us could have predicted how intimate that association would become.
It was strange we hadn’t met earlier; for an all too brief spell in the late eighties her eponymous restaurant in the West Village was one of my favorite dinner destinations, although I don’t recall that I ever met the proprietress. At the time downtown restaurants were divided into those places where you went to see and be seen and those places where you went for the food. Although Lora’s had a surfeit of celebrity patrons—Madonna was a regular—the food was the real draw; it was a homey place, the menu startlingly simple and refreshing at a time when chefs were competing to see how many diverse and incompatible ingredients they could cram into one dish, when every meal seemed to be topped with something along the lines of raspberry chili cilantro vinaigrette with green tea anchovy sorbet. Ah, yes, the eighties. Who can remember them? Strangely enough, I do remember a sublime grilled chicken I had upstairs at Lora’s. When I first saw the menu, I didn’t know what to make of it, so devoid of frills, flourishes, and furbelows. Where the hell was the chipotle mango pesto, the raspberry mole? (When I later learned she was from San Francisco, and was friends with Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, the whole thing made a little more sense.) Over the course of a few visits I noticed that the menu changed almost daily and was based on seasonally available ingredients—much less common then than it is today.
Some six years after Lora shuttered her restaurant and shouldered debts she’d be paying off for years to come, I was hired to write the wine column for House & Garden. Her other reservations aside, Lora was appalled to discover my lack of knowledge and enthusiasm for California wine, and she dispatched me there to begin my education, the first and last trip I made by myself for the magazine. It’s possible she was trying to sabotage me by arranging my first-ever professional appointment with the winemaker Helen Turley, a.k.a the Wine Goddess, a notorious perfectionist and curmudgeon, but, scary as it was, I somehow managed to survive that tasting without entirely revealing my vast reserves of ignorance. In subsequent years I learned a great deal from Turley and her husband, John Wetlaufer—not only about tasting and viticulture, but also about the importance of taking milk thistle to protect the liver and how to sauté fresh foie gras. That first trip Lora also sent me to a little place in Yountville called the French Laundry. I’d eaten at Rakel, the chef’s short-lived venture in downtown New York, but I was totally unprepared for the wildly inventive, multicourse orgy Thomas Keller was conjuring nightly at his new West Coast post. Later, I shared many feasts with Lora there, after days spent at wineries in Napa and Sonoma. Although she usually objected to overly elaborate cuisine, she was one of Keller’s earliest and most enthusiastic fans.
From the start our respective roles in the Condé Nast hierarchy were ill defined. As food editor and full-time employee, she had a kind of supervisory role over my column, although she had no editorial background, and my columns were in fact edited by a literary intellectual named Elizabeth Pochoda, friend of Philip Roth’s, late of The Nation. I guess Lora thought of herself as my boss, whereas I thought of her as my assistant. Luckily, I knew more about wine than she did. Not much more, but enough. On the other hand, she had an extraordinary palate; she was a great blind taster and could parse out the scent and flavor components of wine better than anyone I’ve ever known. She was also a great cook and utterly passionate about food; I didn’t know all that much about food, wine’s alleged boon companion, and Lora was to become my tutor in the joys of cooking and eating, although not without a fight, or rather many fights, along the way.
I’m still not sure how Lora became my travel companion or convinced Dominique to pay for her to accompany me on all wine
-related trips. She must have suggested that I couldn’t be trusted on my own, and it’s true that I’m very absentminded and badly organized. Lora is the opposite. I don’t want to say she’s anal-retentive, but I can’t think of a better phrase at the moment. She organized the trips, made the calls, held the tickets until the gate, and drove the rental car. She hated my driving and early on banned me from the driver’s seat. Apparently, I bounce up and down on the accelerator in a way that’s conducive to nausea. I was happy enough to be the navigator and happy to have everything taken care of. For the next twelve years we logged tens of thousands of miles across Europe, the States, and South America. We visited the best winemakers in the world: Angelo Gaja, Robert Mondavi, Richard Geoffroy of Dom Pérignon, Bruno Borie of Ducru-Beaucaillou, Marcel Guigal, Helen Turley, and Baroness Philippine Rothschild. We became friends with many of these people, some of them early in their careers. We dined with them at some of the best restaurants in the world, drank too much with them, and even flirted with some of them. At least I did and would have gotten lucky on occasion if not for Lora’s interference. Determined not to see me sleep with anyone I shouldn’t be sleeping with, she claimed it wasn’t professional, but her own vehemence seemed strangely personal, her ostensible jealousy all the more interesting since she’s gay.
Lora somehow must have thought that she was in the closet when we first met, or else that I was too much of a heterosexual clod to notice alternative sexual bents. About two years after we started working together, we were on a wine trip in the Napa Valley, and she made me sit down and watch the two-hour “coming out” episode of Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres’s nineties sitcom. “Well, hon,” she said afterward—she called everyone “hon”—“can you guess what I’m trying to say?” I pretended to be surprised, and we had a weepy, huggy scene, then opened a bottle of Champagne. I became the confidant of her love life, and she of mine. My third marriage was starting to unravel during our early years on the road, and Lora listened to the whole story. And I, in my turn, heard the story of the breakdown of the great love of her life, a few years before.