'World's Best Chef': Face-to-face with Ferran Adria

SINGAPORE — Success, like ingredients to the perfect recipe, is measured in different ways. One of them is by counting the number of people who vied for a table in your restaurant.

Two million. There were reportedly two million people who competed in the last couple of years for a table in El Bulli, the three-Michelin star restaurant of Chef Ferran Adria, voted five times by the influential Restaurant magazine as the “world’s best chef.”

El Bulli is a quaint restaurant overlooking the Cala Montjoi bay, in Roses on the Costa Brava in Catalonia, Spain, about two hours from Barcelona. Two million reservations to dine at El Bulli mean a backlog of three years at the restaurant, where the cost of a dinner is approximately 250 euros per head. Still, a lot of these hopefuls will have to wait forever to dine in El Bulli, for it only opens its doors six months a year. To make the wait even longer, Chef Adria made world headlines recently by announcing that El Bulli will be shutting its doors from December 2011 until 2014, news that shook the culinary world as the announcement that the Beatles were breaking up shook the musical world 40 years ago.

It’s just Chef Adria’s style — you either serve the best or not at all.

El Bulli serves about 8,000 people per season (six months) or some 50 a night. There is no fixed menu. The restaurant whips up daily 35 dishes per person, prepared by 33 cooks. There are about 37 waiters, who make 25 visits per table. Chef Adria wants the serving conducted with military precision, for he believes dining bliss, “is to be able to have what you feel like having at the moment you want it.”

World Gourmet Summit

At the World Gourmet Summit here, Adria was a virtual god, the George Clooney of the culinary galaxy, with a half-a-kilometer-long queue of people waiting to get his autograph. I have never before seen a chef so celebrated.

The summit is an international gastronomic extravaganza sponsored by Citibank and supported by the Singapore Tourism Board. Singapore is not just the Merlion, Orchard Road or Sentosa. It positions itself as a hub, not just of commerce and recreation, but also of epicurean delights. The annual World Gourmet Summit trains the spotlight on Singapore as the stage for the best performances of the world’s renowned chefs and vintners.

Adria’s arrival in Singapore was awaited with bated breath as the summit coincided with the air travel ban in most of Europe due to the temperamental Icelandic volcano.

But organizers were confident of Adria’s arrival. One of the organizers told Lifestyle Asia’s Cheryl Tiu, who, like this writer and Tatler’s Chit Lijauco, was invited by the Singapore Tourism Board for the summit: “I will send you flowers for the rest of my life if Adria doesn’t show up.”

And lo and behold, a smiling and congenial Chef Adria was there at the ballroom of the Grand Copthorne Hotel in his white chef’s robe. Despite his celebrity, Chef Adria, who started his culinary career as a dishwasher and a cook in the Spanish navy, struck me as unspoilt by success. He mingled with his fans and never once in a hurry to get photo-ops, autograph-signing sessions and lectures over with. You would, after all, want to rub elbows with the guy. According to published sources, El Bulli was judged Number One on Restaurant magazine’s Top 50 list of the world’s best restaurants a record five times — in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Before Adria joined El Bulli, the restaurant was relatively unknown. It was a traditional French restaurant. Adria was not afraid to experiment. In the late 1980s, Adria began performing cooking experiments that would forever change El Bulli’s place in culinary history. His experiments are often associated with Molecular Gastronomy, the “application of science to culinary practices and cooking phenomena.”

And to think, in the beginning, he “was ashamed to be introduced as a chef. He would rather have been a football star,” said the Spanish Tourism Board’s Enrique Ruiz de Lera, who was largely credited for bringing Adria to Asia. “How times have changed,” Ruiz de Lera quipped.

His secret recipe

Adria himself shared the secret recipe to success. Despite all the accolades given him, he always hungers for knowledge.

“The greatest thing is that I don’t know anything,” he told us, speaking through an interpreter. “The one who pretends to know everything is a poor man. I myself would need 100 lives to learn all there is to learn about cuisine.”

“As a chef, everything is relative,” added the 47-year-old Barcelona native, “nobody is absolutely right. For example the perfect pasta in Italy should be al dente. But in China, the pasta is not al dente and that’s alright, too.”

Although renowned for the way he used science and technology to come up with innovative dishes (for one, he cooks some dishes in liquid nitrogen), Chef Adria said El Bulli “is not about technology. It is about hands.”

“His creations are designed to surprise and enchant his guests but the importance of taste is always the ultimate goal,” says a critic. I haven’t sampled his cooking, but he is celebrated for creating such dishes as turtle dove with blackberry caviar and duck foie gras candies. Ferran Adrià and his partners Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià published A Day at El Bulli in 2008 (I hear it is available locally) and among the recipes included in the book are melon with ham, pine nut marshmallows, steamed brioche with rose-scented mozzarella, rock mussels with seaweed and fresh herbs, and passion fruit trees.

He calls his creations, “elaborations.”

Chef Adria will open a think-tank (a taller) in Barcelona in the three years until he reopens his restaurant. He says he doesn’t worry about losing income since, “I have no children anyway.” No one knows for sure what and where his new restaurant in 2014 will be. It’s like a dish coming out of the oven after a seemingly interminable wait.

For after all is said and done, Chef Adria, for all the feathers on his toque, is simply someone who cooks up surprises.

“We are chefs, we are cooks,” he says proudly. And boy, he no longer regrets not being a football star.

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