From a remote coast on Costa Brava in Spain, a busy kitchen is bustling with over forty stagiers, and gourmands constantly flock over in a pilgrimage-like tide to a once-in-a-lifestyle food experience. In this small corner of the world, a culinary revolution is taking place in the kitchen of El Bulli, and at the head of it all is a small man with dark eyes and a sharp Castillan tongue. Even to those who speak Spanish, he can be quite hard to understand. His work is meticulous and complex but familiarly revolutionary, or so they say. He plays with his food and they say he can do magic. Those in his profession call him a molecular gastronomist, but to the rest of the world, he is a kitchen alchemist that goes by the name of Ferran Adria.
Molecular gastronomy is a relatively new field, subject to fiery criticisms and speculative misunderstandings. Is it a threat to the classical culinary arts? Is it a mockery to food? Is it nothing more but a short-lived phenomenon that’s reeling out its time in the limelight? Our host in this journey is Anthony Bourdain, a professional chef that has been turning out some of the best, most warming French bistro dishes for the past twenty or so years in New York. He’s turned up a couple of cookbooks and food books and he’s become a regular fixture on American TV. His distinctly American feel gives us the audience a warm reassurance-like something familiar to hinge on-as he takes us through unfamiliar and potentially scandalous terrain. Best of all, he’s a classically trained chef, and it certainly adds a more interesting dimension to the documentary as he attempts to take on Ferran Adria-an unconventional chef by ‘most all standards-from this perspective.
It’s roughly a 40-some minute documentary narrated by Tony Bourdain, and it attempts to shed some semblance of understanding of the molecular gastronomy movement by taking on its most famous child, Adria. The documentary kicks off with Tony’s trip to a jamon shop in Barcelona, which Adria instructs him to pay a visit to first. No sophisticated equipment or weird glasswares. It was a traditional, top-notch jamon shop that first illustrates to us the basic precept of molecular gastronomy: the transformation of food from one form to another, and it could be just as good, if not completely better. With this lesson in mind, Tony gets a look into a day in Adria’s Barcelona laboratory, where he spends the six months of a year that his restaurant El Bulli is closed, working with a tight team of chefs, chemists, engineers, and an industrial designer, relentlessly experimenting on anything from simple cooking methods to groundbreaking techniques.
It’s a sophisticated laboratory where Tony first samples some of Adria’s creations, and we see the strict discipline these Spanish folks take into their work ethic. From here, Tony has the pleasure of experiencing the full course meal at El Bulli, with Adria as his host. Here we get a sampling of some culinary Mecca fare, as each dish proceeds to top the creativity and ingenuity of the previous one. Carrot air, perfectly congealed globes of ravioli filling without the ravioli, fondant-dipped cherries that isn’t really covered with fondant but Iberico ham fat…these are the coup, the masterpiece of molecular gastronomy’s favorite child. And we can certainly share in Adria’s delight as we watch Tony register childlike expressions of wonder as each dish proceeds from the kitchen to his table, and the amazement that instantly lights up his face with every new bite of a dish.
Decoding Ferran Adria is a good introductory sampler of Adria’s work, but through the 40-some minute run, you can sometimes feel as if Tony were doing too much eating and less talking. It doesn’t introduce you in depth to molecular gastronomy. Instead, it dishes out culinary creations to fascinate without shedding much understanding. The craft then appears to be delightful and mysterious, like something we can only admire from afar like every strange or novel dish that came out to greet Tony.
But what we do get, is the essence of Adria’s work. Tony sums it all beautifully as the documentary closes with a visit at Adria’s favorite seafood restaurant somewhere in the winding back roads of Barcelona. You don’t have to upset the world’s notions of what an excellent gastronomic experience is all about. Freshness and finesse are still the prevailing rules of the game, after all. But there are many ways of approaching these rules, endless methods of enhancing the culinary experience. At the end of it all, Tony has us who ask “why” when faced with Adria’s revolutionary visions pause a moment to think back and finally ask, “why not?”
