The journey of El Bulli

A unique visit

A visit to El Bulli 1846 will leave no vis­i­tor un­touched. The set­ting is bu­colic, with Cala Mon­tjoi and the sea as a back­drop. Based on 69 artis­tic, au­dio­vi­sual and con­cep­tual in­stal­la­tions, the new mu­seum ex­plains how the par­a­digm of world gas­tron­omy changed. At the en­trance to the his­toric build­ing, a leg­end makes it very clear: “Copy­ing is not cre­at­ing”. It is a phrase that we find printed in the note­books in the shop at the en­trance and that gives mean­ing to the en­tire mu­seum. A visit al­lows the restau­rant’s for­mer din­ers to re­call their ex­pe­ri­ences, while those who were never lucky enough to be able to ex­pe­ri­ence the din­ing ex­pe­ri­ence first had can imag­ine it and go some way to un­der­stand­ing why it be­came the epi­cen­tre that rev­o­lu­tionised world cui­sine.

The jour­ney be­gins out­side, with an in­ter­pre­tive labyrinth built from var­i­ous in­stal­la­tions that bring us closer to the role of cook­ing and in­no­va­tion; all this, by the hand of Fer­ran Adrià. Here vis­i­tors will find the Sapi­ens Method­ol­ogy, which takes the form of the first en­cy­clopae­dia of gas­tro­nomic restora­tion in the West: the Bul­li­pedia.

The old restau­rant, the next stage on the tour, is one of the high­lights of the trip. Vis­i­tors will find the ta­bles set as if going back to July 30, 2011, the last day the chef en­tered the din­ing room, and there is also in­for­ma­tion about the his­tory of the restau­rant. From a small ter­race and bar­be­cue, Jean-Louis Ne­ichel and, above all, Juli Soler, began to build the foun­da­tions of what would be the fu­ture Bulli. At that time, Fer­ran Adrià was doing mil­i­tary ser­vice in Carta­gena. There, he worked in the kitchen of the cap­tain gen­eral and be­friended an­other re­cruit, Fermí Puig, who rec­om­mended that he go to El Bulli. It was then that Juli Soler pro­posed that he man­age the kitchen. The rest is his­tory, told through pho­tographs and other doc­u­ments. The trip, at this point, be­comes melan­choly, es­pe­cially for those who were lucky enough to visit when it was op­er­at­ing as a restau­rant. For other mor­tals, the dif­fer­ent rooms are a re­minder of the story of that dream.

The route also in­vites us to re­mem­ber the tools and tech­niques that made El Bulli a land­mark; the at­mos­phere of the kitchen is even re­pro­duced, as if vis­i­tors were en­ter­ing a sculp­tor’s work­shop. Here we learn how Fer­ran Adrià, Juli Soler and their team came to con­ceive the 28 iconic dishes and the 1846 cre­ations that came out of that culi­nary work­shop. The num­ber is not ran­dom. 1846 is the year of birth of Au­guste Es­coffier, the French writer who in­tro­duced the meth­ods of French cui­sine and pro­moted mod­ern cook­ing. Fer­ran Adrià wanted to match the num­ber of recipes with that an­niver­sary and has taken the num­ber to give a name to the El Bulli legacy. On the upper floor, vis­i­tors will find a lot of ma­te­r­ial, which is often dif­fi­cult to di­gest: di­a­grams, note­books and maps to cre­ate each dish, in­ter­ac­tion with other artis­tic dis­ci­plines and also Fer­ran Adrià’s key trip to Japan. The tour ends at the top of the build­ing, right next to the orig­i­nal en­trance. Here we find a room with a spe­cial dome, cre­ated by the RCR ar­chi­tec­ture stu­dio and the DNA of El Bulli, show­ing us all the pro­jects car­ried out from 2011 to date and now de­signed for re­search pur­poses.

Vis­i­tors will not find any food at El Bulli 1846. Fer­ran Adrià made this very clear when first pre­sent­ing the pro­ject. “No one will eat there again,” he said at the time. In fact, as if he wanted to ex­pressly em­pha­sise that mes­sage or try to re­duce every­thing to the con­cept, to the im­ma­te­r­ial, the vis­i­tor will not find a bar, let alone a restau­rant, on the premises. Not even a vend­ing ma­chine for food or drinks. Only a glass of water of­fered by the ush­ers and a water dis­penser to make the heat more bear­able. At the new El Bulli “knowl­edge is eaten”, in the words of Fer­ran Adrià.