Ferran Adrià

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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).

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).

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