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Interview
14 January 2018 0.00 h

Ferran Adrià

Ferran Adrià

Ferran Adrià (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 1962) is one of the world’s great chefs. After closing his El Bulli restaurant, he now focuses on creativity, his El Bulli Foundation, and his new project in Cala Montjoi. We spoke to him when he guested at a ’Sopars de Girona’ event, a meeting of Girona people living and working in Barcelona

El Bulli Foundation has two visions: to preserve all of the El Bulli legacy and to share our experience in innovation and creation El Bulli 1846 will be incredible! It will be spread over 5,000 square metres, more than the Macba or the Dalí Museum

Why did you close down El Bulli in 2011, when you were on top of the world, and re­ceiv­ing the most dis­tin­guished awards and recog­ni­tion?

From the be­gin­ning, our vi­sion and ob­jec­tive was to reach the limit of what the table ex­pe­ri­ence could offer. There­fore, one of the main rea­sons we stopped is that we re­alised we couldn’t go any fur­ther.
So it’s not be­cause you got tired or be­cause of a lack of pas­sion?
I am pas­sion­ate about cui­sine, but I also have a pas­sion for learn­ing! I am a chef and my job is in­no­va­tion. I think I have a cer­tain abil­ity for the analy­sis of cui­sine, cre­ation and in­no­va­tion. If you learn, you keep com­ing up with new pro­jects.
And how does that hap­pen?
Let’s start from the be­gin­ning. Some 22% of small Cata­lan com­pa­nies don’t last for more than two years. And 50% don’t last for more than five years. The great eco­nomic prob­lem we have in Cat­alo­nia is bad man­age­ment in micro and small busi­nesses. It is hor­ri­ble. And don’t think it is any bet­ter else­where in Eu­rope or the US. In so­ci­ety today, we have not learnt to un­der­stand that if a young per­son wants to set up a restau­rant, they not only need to know about wine and food, but also -and most im­por­tantly- about how to run a busi­ness. They don’t know what a busi­ness is!
So you see El Bulli Foun­da­tion as a pos­si­ble tool for help­ing to over­come these ob­sta­cles?
The El Bulli Foun­da­tion pro­ject has two vi­sions: to pre­serve all of the El Bulli legacy and to share our ex­pe­ri­ence in in­no­va­tion and cre­ation, to im­prove ef­fi­ciency in in­no­va­tion. In El Bulli, we changed so­ci­ety’s re­la­tion­ship with the world. And the spirit of Juli Soler will al­ways be with us.
What will the re­cently ap­proved El­Bulli 1846 be like?
It will be in­cred­i­ble! It will be spread over 5,000 square me­tres, more than the Macba or the Dalí Mu­seum. It is a unique venue con­ceived of as an en­ter­tain­ment cen­tre about the en­vi­ron­ment of gas­tron­omy in evo­lu­tion. The foun­da­tion is pri­vate and with­out any pub­lic con­tri­bu­tion, with an in­vest­ment of seven to eight mil­lion euros, which is why it was post­poned for so long. The con­cept of the pro­ject is also three years late, as it has evolved over time. We spent five years re­search­ing in­no­va­tion and work­ing with the best ex­perts in the world.
What have you been work­ing on ex­actly for the past few years?
We’ve been de­vel­op­ing pro­jects with the best hostelry or­gan­i­sa­tions in the world. With Esade we’ve done pro­jects on cre­ative au­di­to­ria, which is a tool used at El Bulli to eval­u­ate the ca­pac­ity for in­no­va­tion, pro­jects with the Roca Broth­ers, Sant Joan de Déu and Hewlett-Packard. There is still a lot to be done. We be­lieve in on­line ed­u­ca­tion, es­pe­cially in MOOC (Mas­sive On­line Open Courses).
What do you think of TV shows like Mas­terChef, which aim to bring cui­sine to a gen­eral au­di­ence?
I watch lit­tle tele­vi­sion, just about only doc­u­men­taries. Even though nowa­days we can choose en­ter­tain­ment... Yet, I am a great de­fender of Mas­terChef, even if they crit­i­cised me a lot for it at the be­gin­ning. The rea­son is sim­ple. I’ve never found one mis­take re­lated to cui­sine in this pro­gramme. If you ask your­self how long it took hu­mans to mas­ter fire, is that an in­tel­lec­tual chal­lenge? Not at all. In order to un­der­stand what cui­sine is, you need to un­der­stand human evo­lu­tion. In three years, some 10,000 peo­ple vis­ited our Bul­ligrafia, –our archive-mu­seum de­vel­oped by el­Bulli restau­rant’s cre­ative au­di­to­ria. Among them were six Nobel prizewin­ners, busi­ness­men, CEOs, in­tel­lec­tu­als, pro­fes­sors, sci­en­tists, a lit­tle bit of every­thing. None of them could give me the right an­swer. The fact is that human evo­lu­tion took some 2.5 mil­lion years after the ar­rival of the first homo ha­bilis. On the other hand, hu­mans needed some 1.5 mil­lion years to mas­ter fire (from the first ev­i­dence of the pres­ence of fire, some 1.9 mil­lion years ago, until hu­mans man­aged to mas­ter it, some 400,000 years ago).
You often talk about the his­tory of civil­i­sa­tion. Why is that?
In order to con­tex­tu­alise and un­der­stand it bet­ter. Five thou­sand years ago, in Mesopotamia, the first civil­i­sa­tion with rel­e­vant so­cial classes emerged. There were the rich and the poor. The rich ones

El Bulli’s legacy

Enric Calzada
I still can’t step foot in France; we have a kind of a understandable love-hate relationshipThis generation is much better than I was at their age. Their training is amazing. But we need to make them understand how a business works

Best chef in the world, according to Restaurant Magazine, and with three Michelin stars, Ferran Adrià began his journey as a cook working in various restaurants from 18 until he became head chef at El Bulli in 1986. A year later, the restaurant’s philosophy changed towards his own Mediterranean vision of haute cuisine. In 1990, he and his business partner Juli Soler began their great adventure. In 2011, he set up El Bulli Foundation, which aims to preserve El Bulli’s legacy.

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