Love and Other Ways of Dying (7 page)

With each dish, Ferran distinguished himself, for the act of eating was a full-on, full-contact orgy. His mouth, with its thin, quick lips and athletic tongue, worked frenetically. And at times, he didn’t just eat the food, he wore it. He took the fresh prosciutto, fine, bright prosciutto that smelled like … well, like sex … and rubbed it on his upper lip (the same as sniffing wine, he said, or eating lamb with a sprig of rosemary beneath your nose). His fingers were soon bathed in olive oil and flecked with pepper, dancing quickly from plate to plate, so quickly, in fact, that our own fingers began to dance for fear that the food would vanish.

Platos
came and went. Crustaceans arrived, various shades of orange, pink, and purple, just scooped from boiling water, with waggling antennae. Ferran picked up a prawn, one about the length of his hand, that looked like a shrunk-down lobster. Its shell was covered on the outside with small white eggs (a prawn that I would have studiously avoided altogether), and he began to lick the eggs with such ferocity that I decided I must have been missing something important and went digging for an eggs-on-shell prawn myself.

While I don’t consider myself a delicate eater, next to Ferran I felt effete as hell. Particle by particle, cell by cell, he imbibed and inhaled and ingested until particle by particle and cell by cell he seemed changed by the food itself. Even when he sipped his cold beer, it was as if he were gulping from a chalice, washing everything clean. Now he held his prawn before me, its creepy black eyes staring into mine, and asked what it looked like. Face-to-face with the prawn, I was speechless. “It’s intimidating, it’s scary, it’s prehistoric,” Ferran said for me. “But in this context, it’s normal. For generations, we’ve been eating prawns. If tomorrow someone puts a spider on the plate, then everyone’s going to say it’s crazy. But I don’t see the difference. For you to understand what the ocean is, you have to understand something that Americans would think is crazy. You have to suck this …”

He suddenly tore the head of the prawn from its carapace and held it in the space between us. “You mean the head?” I said, stating the obvious, stalling for time, processing a simple thought: I don’t think I want to eat the head. It doesn’t seem like something I want to eat.

“Yes, the head,” said Ferran. “If I can describe in one word the taste of the sea, it’s sucking the head of this prawn. At home, my parents sucked the head. I tasted it and comprehended it. Just suck it.”

He took the head, put the open end to his lips, and crushed
the shell until everything in it (brain and viscera, bits of meat and shell) had been expelled into his mouth, caramel-colored liquid dribbling down his chin. He savored it for a long moment, his eyes closed, and he seemed to have reached some kind of ecstasy. When he opened his eyes, it was my turn. I started tentatively, but there was no tentative way to crush a prawn head and suck it dry, so I just began crushing and slurping, juice running down my chin now. It was a profound and powerful taste, oddly sublime; the essence of this thing was, yes, salty, but also deeply evolved. It was cognac and candy, bitter and sweet, plankton and fruit. It seemed like the whole chemical history of the world in one bite.

“This is taste,” said Ferran. “Not
the
taste, it
is
taste. You can’t explain this.”

He went on. “In a restaurant like this, we can eat the head. Spanish people find it provocative. They have an affection for it,” he said. “At El Bulli, no, people are not prepared to eat the head. Ninety-nine percent of the people won’t eat the head. It’s not permitted in high cuisine.” He took another prawn in his hand, pulled off the head, and crushed it. This time the caramel-colored liquid pooled on the plate before him.

“But if I pour this over food in my kitchen, I’ve changed the context. I can do this and people will eat it. People will eat it and taste the Mediterranean. This is what I look for. This is what I search for. This potency. Double the potency. The depths of the sea …” He sat back for a moment, considered. Then he reflexively leaned forward, swiped a finger through the puddle of prawn nectar, brought it to his mouth, and licked it.

“Mágico,”
he said.

8. [APHORISMS FROM THE PROFESSOR, SEQUEL]

In the kitchen, scribbling in a notebook marked
SISTEMA CREATIVO
: “Anarchy is fine but only after logic.”

Before we said goodbye one night: “There’s more emotion,
more feeling, in a piece of ruby-red grapefruit with a little sprinkle of salt on it than in a big piece of fish.”

To me, spoken conspiratorially: “The perfect meal: Have a reservation so that you can look forward to being there. In a secluded place, where there’s a certain magic in arriving. Four people, everyone on a level playing field gastronomically. There shouldn’t be a leader. Equals. When the food starts coming, concentrate on the dish, then speak about the dish. You have to laugh a lot. For me, it would be better to go with my partner because I like to have a woman by my side.”

At the end: “Until I can serve an empty white plate on a white tablecloth, there’s a lot to be done.”

9. [ON MEXICO]

During my August sojourn at El Bulli, Ferran invited me to return to Barcelona in the winter to watch him, his brother, and a third young chef, Oriol, at the workshop, where during their off months they like to experiment wildly. The workshop is located in a very old building in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona just off the Ramblas, which, when I arrived, was brightly lit with Christmas lights. I climbed a worn stone staircase that led through an enormous set of carved wooden doors, and then the workshop appeared like a modernist’s dream: a cool, high-ceilinged space with pine floorboards and white walls and Omani rugs. Upstairs, a library houses hundreds of cookbooks, as well as everything—shelf after shelf—that’s been written by or about Ferran Adrià.

From a balcony on the second floor, it’s possible to look down on the kitchen as if from a luxury box, witnessing the consternations and elations of Albert, Oriol, and Ferran. Albert is a fairer, younger version of his brother, and Oriol, at twenty-seven, is simply a madman, according to Ferran. On this morning, Oriol had just returned from the market while Albert was in hand-to-hand combat with a food processor known as the Pacojet.

It was this device that broke one day in the kitchen at El Bulli, prompting Ferran to see what would happen if they ran frozen chocolate in it, broken. From that came something called “chocolate dust,” very fine dust devils of chocolate—a kind of vanishing chocolate, something between solid and air—that Ferran seized upon as a wholly new substance.

Now the group was working on about thirty things at once, among them “basil cylinders” (flavored ice frozen in the shape of a perfect emerald cylinder, to be filled with a yet-undetermined ice cream, perhaps Parmesan), something called “sponge ham” (a complete mystery to everyone), and a bowl of foie gras and apple foam, into which the diner would pour a broth, disintegrating everything to a soup for which they were also seeking a third and fourth ingredient.

“We’re going to be much more interactive this year,” said Ferran. He showed me a morsel of grilled chicken on a white plate and then seven spice holders (marked
MEXICO
,
INDIA
,
JAPAN
,
MOROCCO
, et cetera). “With this dish, you decide the end of the film,” he said. “We give you the chicken, and you decide the spice.” Oriol and Albert had already spent much time trying to refine each of the spice mixtures, making sure that a full octave of taste was present in each, the best curry from India or wasabi from Japan, and that each complemented the rest.

Now it was time for Ferran to try. Oriol and Albert crowded around him as he approached the plate, staring solemnly at the nugget of chicken. He picked up the container marked
MEXICO
and shook a bit on his finger, then sampled it. He said nothing. Then he shook it over the chicken, the specks raining down in a red shower, and then he grabbed another shaker and shook it, too.

“Look out, uncle, that’s salt!” said Albert, appearing stricken.

“Don’t get dizzy here, I know,” said Ferran, concentrating. He popped the chicken into his mouth and chewed. He stared
into the middle distance. His eyebrows rose and fell as if registering a series of gustatory sensations. He considered it for a long time, then after a while longer, he shook his head emphatically … No. “It’s not Mexico,” he said.

Albert looked flabbergasted. “For me, it is!”

“It’s not. You taste tomato, cilantro, but it’s not Mexico.”

“It’s my Mexico,” said his brother.

“It needs more, but I won’t call that Mexico.”

Both brothers glared at the plate, at the specks of red spice left on the white porcelain. Disappointment lingered for a moment, then suddenly it was converted to forward motion again. Ferran cocked his head, then Albert did, too, noticing his brother’s shifting mood.

“That would taste good on clouds,” Ferran said. “You’d taste the spices individually, eating it off a cloud. Try India on that. Let’s try it!”

Albert pushed Oriol toward the refrigerator, Oriol produced a bowl of apple foam that he’d made for the foie soup and dolloped some into a bowl, Albert shook India onto the highest peaks of the lather, and Ferran spooned it up. Though there was nothing solid in that spoonful, his mouth moved as if he were chewing. His eyes began to light, but still he didn’t speak. His eyebrows followed the taste and texture up and down, and when it was over, he looked up. “That’s beautiful,” he said reverently. “That’s really beautiful.”

Albert took a spoonful, and then Oriol. And each had the same reaction, the same facade of skepticism giving way to some new quizzical appreciation for the taste in his mouth, and then a grin. “Uncle, that’s good,” said Albert. Oriol just nodded his approval vigorously. Now Ferran handed me a spoon, and I tried, too. Each spice of India (the cocoa and lemongrass, the lime and curry) seemed to burn down individually, while the cool apple
spread out beneath it, lifting it from the tongue. It felt like the Fourth of July in your mouth.

Before I could say anything, though, we’d moved on. To a quail egg. And now we were crowded around a pot of boiling water. The quail egg, which was the size of a small Superball, had been Oriol’s obsession throughout the morning. I’d watched him crack egg after egg, strain them between brown-speckled shells until he was left with only the miniature yolks, and then boil them for five, ten, twenty, thirty, sixty seconds, removing the golden globe of yolk with a metal catcher, cooling it for a moment, and then tasting it—just to see what he got each time. After some consultation, it was agreed that the ten-second yolk was the best, sublime even, somewhere between raw and cooked but tasting like neither, the liquid inside warm and already swarming down the back of the throat by the time it touched the tongue. In fact, Ferran was afraid to do more to it. Oriol suggested covering the yolk in baked Parmesan, and he crumbled some over it. Ferran let a drop of olive oil fall on it, then spooned it up.

And this time there was no doubt; his response was immediate. “It’s a natural ravioli!” he said, nodding, Yes, yes, yes. “We can serve it just like that.” He turned and walked away, turned back again. He could hardly contain himself. Again, everyone tried one. “That’s it,” he said, on the verge of levitation. “We can try other things with it, but that’s it!” He turned to me. “This is when I’m happiest. Finding the egg.”

And here’s what it tasted like: It tasted like a first—the first time you dove into an ocean wave or made something good or touched her lips. The first time you jumped from fifty feet, that feeling in the air when you forgot the gorge was beneath you, air and sun rushing, and you kept falling, and you opened your eyes and you were in the bright, underwater lights of a kitchen in Barcelona
before an elfin man with hair springing from his head, quail yolk in your belly, and you could think of only two words to say, but you said them at least two times before you stopped yourself.

“Thank you,” you said, laughing. “Thank you.”

10. [ON THE PLEASURES OF THE TABLE]

On the last of our August days in Spain, Ferran said simply: Bring your wife and arrive by nine. Of course, I did as told. Being here had done our family good. We had swum. We were tan. Back home, phones were ringing, bills were piling, office workers were shooting each other dead, but the higher we climbed the mountain, the easier we could breathe again. It was the simplest thing.

Ferran had reserved us a table on the patio, beneath a stone arch and a nearly full moon. Even before the meal began, we experienced the odd sensation of being alone for the first time in many months, without Baby. The calm was almost exotic.

I had no doubt that somewhere back in the kitchen, Ferran knew everything that transpired at our table. While I at least had some vague sense of what might be coming, Sara was a neophyte. We barely got past “a childhood memory” (the dried quinoa) before she was smiling. By the time we spooned up our “cloud of smoke,” we were both simply untethered from any concerns but those of the table. Taste became our cynosure, night a thing to be eaten with stars and moon. Ferran Adrià revealed himself in every bite now.

“It’s as if he’s climbed inside my mouth,” Sara said, laughing, taking a second nibble of trout-egg tempura, caviar grazing her lip and disappearing on her tongue.

“Is that good or bad?” I asked.

“It’s … disorienting, but fine by me because, really, it’s”—her face brightened—“so fantastic.”

Next, in a rush, came corn ravioli with vanilla, wasabi lobster, sea urchin with flowers of Jamaica—each one of these dishes weaving the unexpected with the vague outline of something we recognized. At some point, I’ll be honest, I ceased to actually taste the food so much as feel it through Sara, who for the first time in months was no longer someone I passed at 3:00
A
.
M
. but my wife, sitting across a table in a pink sundress, lit by a candle, hair falling to her shoulders, lifting against gravity. She closed her eyes, letting Ferran’s chocolate dust settle and liquefy in her mouth.