Steal the Menu (28 page)

Adrià, she wrote, was upending basic ideas about salty and sweet combinations; his almond ice cream was studded with garlic slivers and splashed with oil and vinegar. There were deconstructions of Catalan regional dishes: bread rubbed with tomato and garlic, then drizzled with olive oil (
pa amb tomàquet
) and turned into “grape-sized pellets of crisp pizza dough, which, when bitten into, release gushes of olive oil.” And the tomato? It was on the side as a scoop of sorbet.

These were the conventional items. Then came the notorious
espumas
, the foams. Adrià got a lot of bad press for these seaweed-gel-thickened essences sprayed out of seltzer siphons. But Friedrich saw that this wasn’t a gimmick and got Adrià to explain why he did it: “Typically you mount a mousse with cream. But that dilutes its flavor. If you mount raspberries with cream, you get the flavor of raspberries and cream. I wanted just the raspberries. Nothing else. I want the pure flavor of the froth you find on top of freshly squeezed orange juice.”

Friedrich, like so many who followed her to El Bulli, got the point of the wilder dishes, the aesthetic joy and surprise that science and imagination could produce. For instance, there was the soup made of frozen peas fresh from the freezer and hot mineral water; it was served in a glass and drunk in one long slurp, during which it changed from hot to cold. She praised the improbable but thrillingly successful, surreal combinations, such as the strip of phyllo dough “topped with diced pineapple” and white truffle shavings and basil and fresh almonds.

I went to El Bulli myself first in February 2001, when it was
closed for its long winter nap. The lonely, twisting drive has often been described. Adrià himself has said it is an essential part of the El Bulli experience, making a meal there the reward at the end of a difficult journey that begins with the struggle for a reservation. There is also the setting, a cliff overlooking a lost cove. (Well, not entirely lost. At the water’s edge is a modest retirement community.)

I made the trip again the next year. El Bulli’s twentieth anniversary seemed like a good time to assess the achievement of the place, because the menu featured dishes from all the past years. There were twenty-six courses, mostly small and surreal, beautiful creations unlike anything my wife or I had ever eaten before. Starting with an intense mojito pumped out of a siphon, we moved on to little white paper cones filled with fine white powder. Before the waiter had a chance to say what it was, Johanna knocked hers back and aspirated enough of the pulverized popcorn to precipitate a choking fit. She recovered in time to join me in the “snack” courses, among which were rose-petal tempura, brilliant red orbs en brochette (a melon ball and a cherry tomato), a crunchy object made out of quail egg, and an anise-flavored consommé siphoned into a beer mug and looking quite a bit like a dark ale with a two-inch head.

There was much, much more in which science played a transforming role, with gels and slow-cooking, dehydration, colloidal trickery—all the magic of so-called molecular gastronomy harnessed to intensify and concentrate the diner’s notions and experience of food.

Every one of those dishes and hundreds of others served at El Bulli between its relatively conservative beginnings in 1983 to the end of the 2004 season were meticulously recorded in four very heavy and expensive tomes. Each dish appears in a color photograph and is cross-indexed and pigeonholed as to its culinary
parameters. Each volume has a fold-out graphic chart and a CD with recipes for every dish, clear but impractical for the home cook without access to sea cucumbers or the wild mushroom known in Catalan as
rossinyol
, not to mention such arcane and expensive kitchen tools as sous vide baths, Anti-Griddles, and specialty chemicals,
and
the will to take on the elaborate tasks that forty-some sous-chefs performed in the very large open kitchen at El Bulli.

Unlike his spiritual forefathers in the nouvelle cuisine revolution, Adrià was determined to tell the world everything, all his discoveries, his theories. So you don’t need me to deconstruct his deconstructions. You do have to be willing to spend several hundred dollars on his books and be able to read them in Spanish or Catalan, but the effort will definitely expand your horizons across many parameters. For example, you will learn that
palomitas
is Spanish for “popcorn” and
cucurucho
refers to those paper cones that nearly flattened my wife. And the combination of pictures, recipes and pontification will convince you almost as much as living through an actual meal at El Bulli that it was a place that took a giant step forward in what one might still call cooking.

“Deconstruction” was not a word the man used lightly. He took ingredients and dismantled them, repurposed them and then made them look like normal food, especially normal Spanish food. I’m thinking right now about his
morcilla
, blood pudding, which is a dish as common in Spain as hot dogs are here.
Morcilla
, the really common version I first ordered by mistake way past my bedtime in Burgos in 1963, looks, when sliced, like a black blini with white maggots in it. Adrià fashioned faux
-morcilla
slices that looked just like the real thing with rice and squid ink.

Now, there’s nothing outré about rice and squid ink. It is, itself, a well known combination of flavors around the Mediterranean. So if you grew up on
morcilla
as well as rice tinged black with squid
ink, you would love biting into this dish thinking it’s blood sausage and then having your taste memory tell you it’s rice with squid ink. This is, however, a very different kind of high-level fun from the gentle and buried ironies of nouvelle cuisine. Think about it. Calling thin-cut salmon an escalope, as the Troigros brothers did, merely suggested that those pieces of salmon were “like” veal scaloppine. The menu said right out that you’d be getting salmon, and if you were tipsy from aperitifs or not paying attention, you might have missed the point of the metaphoric labeling, but that wouldn’t have mattered, since the salmon, in its sorrel sauce, was a very excellent dish by any name.

Adrià wasn’t playing that kind of subtle game. He was flaunting his tricks. Anyone who had ever eaten
morcilla
knew at first bite, if not at first sight, this one was a (brilliant) fabrication. Figuring out what it really was was like a second punch line that just about any Spaniard got the point of.

A lot of the dishes at El Bulli were harder to figure out than the
morcilla
. The science wasn’t common knowledge for any normal diner, but the intense flavors of those desiccated ingredients—say, the spices and herbs that surrounded the cauliflower turned into couscous—helped justify the magic show. Adrià’s food was full of major flavors, many of them not easily identifiable, because he had combined ingredients rarely, or never before, so conjoined. I am thinking of the smoked eel accompanied by ravioli filled with a mixture of pineapple and fennel he invented in 1998.

In one of many similar anecdotes in his El Bulli almanacs about the origins of his dishes, Adrià writes:

To make fennel jelly, Adrià cooks thin slices and leaves them in boiling water until soft, then purees them in a blender and forces the puree through a fine strainer. Then he mixes the strained fennel with gelatin and spreads a thin layer of it in a pan and refrigerates the mixture until it gels and can be cut into three-quarter-inch squares.

It is also worth mentioning the delicate cooking of the eel, its meat-stock-based orange sauce and its garnishes (fried strips of eel skin, ground star anise and grated orange peel), as well as explaining that the ravioli skins were very thin squares of pineapple. All that is clearly spelled out in the recipe on the CD.

In the pell-mell of twenty-six courses, it was a definite challenge to appreciate all of these remarkable details, even with the helpful commentary of the waitstaff (three individuals, if I recall correctly). But it was always clear that each dish was intricate, unprecedented and extremely delicious, if sometimes baffling without exegesis.

As a critic for the
Journal
, I ate in most of the other leading modernist restaurants—the ones I’ve mentioned, the Fat Duck in Bray-on-Thames (U.K.), Alinea in Chicago, both of Thomas Keller’s flagship restaurants, and Momofuku Ko and WD-50 in New York—as well as several others in Spain. They are adventurous places with a commitment to use science to reinvent dining,
culinary laboratories that won the feverish allegiance of millions of well-heeled diners around the world for their use of advanced technology in the service of culinary spectacle. They are also the targets of mockery for their more extreme dishes, foams, burning hay, atomized aromas.

I’m biting my tongue to avoid the label the modernists have come to hate: molecular gastronomy. It was coined to describe a workshop bringing together chefs and scientists back in 1992, by the physicist Nicholas Kurti, whom I had met at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. But the term quickly caused more confusion than it was worth, almost inviting people to dismiss its practitioners as shallow stuntmen with no respect for the past or for fundamental culinary values.

Adrià, Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck and Keller did their best to dispel public misunderstanding with a manifesto released at the end of 2006. “We do not pursue novelty for its own sake,” they wrote. “We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous-vide, dehydration and other non-traditional means, but these do not define our cooking. They are a few of the many tools that we are fortunate to have available as we strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes.”
^d

Blumenthal, a sometime Oxford symposiast, has consulted regularly with scientists, yet he deliberately creates an atmosphere of playful experimentation in his intimate three-star Michelin restaurant in a village very close to London’s Heathrow Airport. His preoccupation with the simple foods of his British childhood and with the tastes of everyday life have inspired some of his most advanced and arresting dishes.

Anglo-French amity took a slow glide forward when Blumenthal combined snails and oatmeal, with all the traditional ingredients
of classic
escargots de Bourgogne:
garlic, butter and parsley, lots of parsley, for a very green presentation of snails on an oat risotto with the texture of rice pudding.

While seeking the perfect palate cleanser to begin a meal, Blumenthal started with toothpaste and ended up with a masterpiece of scientific manipulation of flavors that really did cleanse the palate and wake up the diner’s taste buds. On my visit to the restaurant in 2009, the famous nitro-poached green tea and lime mousse was prepared in front of me. The waiter squeezed out some of the toothpaste-resembling mousse into the extreme cold of liquid nitrogen, which “cooked” it into a sort of meringue. It was then spattered with green tea dust and sprayed with lime essence from an atomizer. The mousse, warmed by the mouth in one gulp, seemed to disappear, leaving a pure, mildly acidic and tannic freshness. I was very pleasantly surprised and ready to eat “real” food.

One of the next dishes served was the “sound of the sea” that I’d first tried (and heard) when Blumenthal served it at Charlie Trotter’s twentieth-anniversary dinner in Chicago.
^e
The main course that followed helped me overcome a bad feeling about licorice lingering from childhood: salmon sheathed in a black licorice gel with artichoke, vanilla mayonnaise and an elite olive oil.

It turns out that Blumenthal didn’t start out liking licorice much, either. As he describes it in a commentary on a similar recipe in his sprightly and very grand
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook
, he was led to use licorice because he had learned that it shared an enzyme with asparagus and he thought that the extreme sweetness of the licorice and the bitterness of the asparagus might balance each other out. At the same time, he was experimenting with gellan, a gelling medium. Mixing it with licorice, he came up with a perfect coating for a strong fish. The shiny black licorice played beautifully against the fatty taste of the salmon. And the gel stayed solid inside an evacuated plastic bag while the salmon poached for twenty-five minutes at the very low temperature of 108 degrees F. The black-giving-way-to-orange contrast as you cut into the fish added an element of circus dash.

For a larger version of this menu, click
here
.