Ferran Adrià On The First Burger And The City That Made Him

Last night, MoMA hosted the world's most famous chef to talk about elBulli 2005-2011, Ferran Adrià's seven-volume compendium of books, one for each season that the restaurant was open between 2005 and 2011. "We had to create a map of what cooking is and what were the drawers, where we could organize this evolution," explained the chef. "We're going to put this model into the history of cooking, not into the story of elbulli."

Those looking through the books' gorgeous photography who never visited the storied restaurant in Roses on the Costa Brava (which even when it was open was only open half the year) will only feel more jealous of what they missed out on at elbulli, which closed in 2011. But even those who did visit it will likely be overwhelmed by the creativity and scope of the years of dishes that they too missed out on. Each of the volumes includes photographs of the dishes served at the restaurant during that year and includes detailed recipes, notes on hard-to-find ingredients, techniques, plating, and presentation.

There were a few gems thrown in along the way as Adrià explained the compendium while sampling bites made in homage to him by The Modern's new chef, Abram Bissell. What did Ferran say was the compendium's inspiration? Screws. Which country most helped make elbulli? Spain? France? Not even close. He touched briefly on hamburgers, the origin of the first mousse, why he closed elBulli, and the need for everyone to be creative with their approach to their lives and their professions, "even" journalists. Read on for the full speech. 

On Which City Most Helped Make elBulli
"First I'm going to explain a little geography. The 30th of July, 2011, was the last day that elBulli was a restaurant. Everybody knows where New York is, but not everyone knows where Cala Montjoi is. It's 6,000 kilometers [3,800 miles] from here on the frontier with France. We're situating ourselves. I have lived in Barcelona since that date, July 30th. A lot of days have passed since then. And actually I've spent more days in New York since then than in Cala Montjoi. What does this mean? It's a small demonstration of all the love that New York has shown me. The first time I came was I think in 1998 or 1999. I met Marcus Samuelsson then, and there was a love story that began then, a continual love story. It's the city that has put Ferran Adrià and elBulli on another level. People may think it's France or Spain, but no, it's been New York. Thank you very much. I feel like I am at home."

Explaining the Compendium
"We're here because we're doing a tour on the books elBulli 2005-2011 that we have done with Phaidon that we started 15 years ago. Fourteen years ago, someone was sitting on the terrace at elBulli looking at the full moon, but they wanted to understand elBulli. How do you understand the full moon? How do you understand a flower? You're either moved or you're not moved. But to understand it you have to study it.

I started to reflect: how do people study things? In order to study something you have to have order and structure. And to create order you have to catalogue things. If we're in one of the world's temples of art, we have catalogues — but just part of it. We know Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, that it started with that painting in 1907 – it's very clear and simple that Cubism started with that painting. And then we're going to go to Braque in 1913, and why can we do this? Why can we reflect on this? Because we know the years that these things happened. We don't have this in cooking."

When Was the First Hamburger?
"When was the first hamburger? We know that it's not from Carrer d'Avinyó. But we need to know this because otherwise it's very hard to do an objective analysis. It's all very simple. Life can be very simple and we make it very complicated. If in our personal lives we know we have photos when we were children, we have it all organized. When we get to the birthday... or when we get to your parents' anniversary who they've been married 50 years, and we have the photos in order, it's very easy to do. If we don't have it organized, it's a disaster. You're spending a whole year trying to make a video of their wedding."[pullquote:right]

The Catalogue's Inspiration? Screws
"Our inspiration was the art world and screws. Because art is not the only thing that is catalogued – screws are also catalogued. People can know the chronology of screws and the evolution of screws. We're doing this in the year 2000. We had to look back to look at all of our earlier information and to see how we could catalogue everything since 1987, which is when we started to create at elBulli. We have documentation, quite a bit of it, and we did a ton of documentation. After 2000, it was easier because we knew it was obligatory then.

Every year, we would catalogue that year and do an evolutionary analysis. We started in 2000. It's a 10,000 page work. I asked a curator here, 'How many works are there of 10,000 pages in the best museum book shop in the world? And the answer is that there are not too many here. If we take the whole work of elBulli, all the books, it's 10,000 pages. I didn't do it on my own. It's been done with 2,000 people who have passed through elBulli. Today, they're the most influential chefs in the world. We started building this world little by little."

How Do You Do an Evolutionary Analysis?
"When I started this process, I didn't know anything about the art world — just like a fan. I decided I wanted to do something objective, not subjective. I didn't want to know if what I did at elBulli each year was better or worse. I wanted to know if it was new. Normally, an evolutionary analysis, it has to be of something creative. You know it's not called 'creative' though, because not everything that makes you evolve is yours. Not Picasso – not everything that he created was his. He took pieces, techniques, tools, elaborations from other places and he adapted them to his way of understanding art, and he created his philosophy, his way. That's an evolutionary analysis. We had to create a map of what cooking is and figure out what were the drawers where we could organize this evolution. We're going to put this model into the history of cooking, not into the story of elBulli."

What Is a Mousse?
"Do you know what a mousse is? [Crowd laughs] Ha, ha, ha. It's not so easy. When is the first time the word 'mousse' was used? When do you think 'mousse' was first used? Nobody knows, but there are a lot of people in the world of gastronomy here and nobody knows. So when? In 1740, more or less, by a chef known as Menon. That's the first time it is documented. He made three mousses, and one of them was made with saffron. It's a vanguard way of cooking. It's the first documentation we have of this. Everything else is archaeology – we don't know. On top of that, cooking is ephemeral and you can't know. Maybe in a thousand years we can create new technologies that will help us view the past.

Did the first mousse have cream? We do an analysis and we start explaining, when was the first hot mousse? Or are we sure that the first mousse was cold? Has someone eaten a hot ice cream here? No. Has anyone eaten a hot gelatin? At elBulli. In 1998, we created the first hot gelatin. That's an analysis of this. The question is not if the first mousse was good, it's not a matter of whether the hot one or cold one was better or worse. It's not a question of whether it's better sweet or salty. The question is when this actually happened."

Compendium as Catalogue Raisonné
"This work that we're doing, that we've been doing all these years... we're in MoMA now, it would be a catalogue raisonné, I can do that with a difference. A catalogue raisonné is subjective. This is not. This is the first catalogue raisonné, an objective one that we've never done, and it's actually what happened. Incredibly, in architecture this exists. In design this exists. In fashion this exists. It actually doesn't exist in any creative discipline that I know of. And that's the value of this work and the past 14 years, done by normal people, cooks who started asking themselves 'why' about things, and asked how they could explain it, so that people could understand this.

We didn't want to do a project that people wouldn't understand, that they couldn't understand easily. And for this reason we did our first reflection on what is cooking. And to do this, we had to organize ourselves. We had products, we had technology, techniques, and we made collaborations that get converted into cooking styles. And this is the history of cooking." 

Why We Closed elBulli
"We haven't closed elBulli – we closed elBulli restaurant. Do you know why we closed elBulli restaurant? We closed elBulli restaurant so we wouldn't have to close elBulli. That's why we closed it."

On the Creative Process
"There's never been an exposition on the creative processes ever, not just cooking, on any kind of creative process. I'm not talking about the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit upstairs, or any of the other wonderful exhibits. This isn't about seeing the plans or the documents. but how did he create? In the morning or in the evening? It can seem like a simple thing, but I would love to know it. Did he work alone or with his team? And what relationship did he have with his team? Was he like Steve Jobs? Or was he like the owner of the Zara retail chain? Steve Jobs wasn't a great friend of his team and the general of Zara was a wonderful person. They're both creative people. One changed the world with new technology; the other changed the world of fashion. They worked totally differently. Wouldn't you like to know how each one of them thinks?"

Everyone Can Be Creative
"We were talking earlier about creativity. There is a journalist here who started the interview with a drawing. She wanted me to draw what I had for breakfast. This is a creative thing. She got me intrigued to do the interview. Everyone can be creative. Everybody has that process. It doesn't matter if you're Picasso or a butcher. A butcher could cut you things that maybe Picasso couldn't do in the process himself. This whole work, we're focusing our work on this. The world changes because of people. And everybody can be creative. We don't have to magnify creativity, we have to magnify the result. What we've done is normal. We think it's normal to have done this work. People talk about elBulli, but they don't really know what happened there. Now they can know it. They can study. This is what's next."

Ferran on Risks
"I'm moved every time I come to New York, because I feel like I'm very much at home here. We need to have a space here for the elBulli foundation, an outpost, so I can come every so often because I do feel very much at home. In this country people love risk. And the whole product of the elBulli foundation is high risk. But if you don't take risks, it wouldn't make any sense."

Books Are Not Enough
"When you think about the people who passed through elBulli – some of you have been and you were part of it as a result, because of the criticism, because you loved it, because you made us reflect, this is all the sum total of elBulli. It's a very difficult thing to repeat. Not only in cooking but any discipline. Few people really know it. It's a bit Martian. People can talk about it, but who has been? This is the problem. The new elBulli 1846, it's going to be a bit more open. The legacy in terms of cooking is the space and all that we've done.

Take New York for example, a restaurant from New York in 1900 – imagine if there was a restaurant that changed the way people thought and the way people ate and understood eating. Imagine that this existed. It would be amazing to have the space still and if someone could explain to me how it changed and why it changed things. Cooking is ephemeral and it goes away and books are not enough. It's a wonderful tool, a big tool if we create them jointly with the space. The books are the script, the history. These books that we've created that are here, they're the fourth dimension of elBulli 1846. It's the fourth facet of the project."

How the Compendium Differs from Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine
"Nathan Myhrvold is an amazing person. He's a very important person in the world of cooking. The smartest thing he did was not to open a restaurant. That's why he's so interesting. I say it sincerely. I've known many Nobel Prize winners and I think he's at the same level. What he's doing is incorporating the scientific method. Not science. The scientific method. And in this way we're very similar. This is a scientific method. We're very similar in many ways. Ninety percent of the time we think the same way about things. We're going to establish a foundation. There are different projects, but they are going to coexist, and the logical thing would be to have a dialogue between them to do interesting and important things. But I think he's a very important person for the United States and the world of gastronomy here in the U.S. Chefs in general all over the world have a great degree of respect for him and it's not easy that they respect someone."

Decoding the Culinary Genome
"In May we're going to be opening the Bullipedia lab. The Bullipedia lab is a place where we're doing the decoding of the culinary genome. It's a kind of taxonomy of cooking. How do we organize what Pliny did or Darwin did, what Darwin did with On the Origin of Species, with cooking. It's not been done in any discipline, not even with the most incredible, which is the art world. And it's incredible that it hasn't been done in the art world. They don't have a decoding of art. There's no decoding of painting. There's no decoding of sculpture. It's an objective way. It's not to say, 'Oh, what's cooking? It's this. It's that." It's to say, 'It's these things in order, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap. This is what painting is.'

We're going to be opening that in May to be able to push ourselves so we reach a consensus. And we'll create a taxonomy. It's a project to reflect on knowledge and information. The world we live in today is dominated by the Internet. It has changed the relationship between knowledge and information. In Europe we have to study the Visigoth kings. Today, it's useless information. I want to understand who they were and what they brought. I don't need to know their names. It doesn't add anything. I can go to Google and I can find the list. It's a reflection on all of this."

The 2015 Opening
"We're opening in 2015, and in May of 2015 we're starting the work on the elBulli 1846. Because we're in a museum today, we're in the museum today, it's a moving place. elBulli 1846 is a reflection on the future of museums. It makes sense here to see Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and all the works that are here, but will this make sense in the future with new technologies when we talk about having an experiential experience? What's experiential? It's a big question. And the elBulli 1846 project is a reflection of this.

We're talking with MIT to do a yearlong project — taking this 1846 project, it's 5,000 square meters [53,820 square feet] covered, 3,000 square meters [32,292 square feet] that will be open, that we have in the courtyard — so when you walk through it, when you enter, you reflect, you reflect on creativity in the world of cooking and you also reflect on happiness. But to explain it like a film is a better way to explain it, where I can understand things. We have it fairly defined, but this next year is going to be a wonderful experience.

Before coming here today, we spent 40 minutes upstairs exploring the museum to immerse myself. I go to places like this in every city for inspiration. Imagine that all of you with your hobbies, the thing that you most enjoy in the world, how would you like the space for it to be. If you like baseball for example, just supposing, how would the space be if you created a museum to explain the experience of baseball through a space? So we're asking ourselves all these questions. And we have an advantage of liberty and freedom. We do what we want, when we want, and for whom we want. This is the dream that anybody would have."

Will There Be Other Chapters?
"There are three projects under the elBulli foundation. There is elBulli 1846, which is the old space where elBulli was. elBulli DNA is the second one, which is the team, the workshop. There will be 40 professionals from all over the world. Everything they create will be sent out on the internet online. The best people in the world in their fields than can come. There will be cooks, chefs, designers, architects, journalists, and writers. And then the last area is Bullipedia. If tomorrow, you want to establish a space in New York for Bullipedia, we will come. We're opening in May. There are a lot of countries that have already expressed interest. It's an inspiring project on knowledge — not on cooking, but on knowledge. It's an important distinction to understand. The product that elBulli will finish is not cooking. Cooking is our language, because it's what we know how to do, but we use cooking to talk about everything we can cover in life."

Arthur Bovino is The Daily Meal's executive editor. Read more articles by Arthur, reach him by email, or click here to follow Arthur on Twitter.