30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEelBulli was in Cala Montjoi, a cove outside Roses on the Costa Brava, reached by a dirt road. The place began in 1961 as a miniature golf course and beach bar, run by the German couple Hans and Marketta Schilling, and was named after their French bulldogs.
Ferran Adrià arrived there in 1984 as a chef in the cold section, aged 22 and fresh out of military service. Three years later he was head chef. That same year he heard the chef Jacques Maximin say that creativity means not copying, and has since described it as the sentence that decided everything.
What made elBulli possible was not primarily the technique but the calendar. From the mid-1990s, the restaurant closed for half the year. During those six months, Adrià and his team sat in a workshop in Barcelona and did nothing but develop, and every new season opened with an entirely new menu on which nothing from the previous year remained. No other restaurant at that level has ever worked that way.
Out of that workshop came spherification, including the liquid olive that looks like an olive and bursts in the mouth, as well as espumas and foams from the siphon, warm gels and frozen powders. Techniques now used by chefs who have never set foot in Spain.
The figures from the final years are difficult to take in. Around 8,000 guests per season and roughly 2 million requests for tables, meaning that just over one in 250 got a seat. The menu comprised around forty courses. The restaurant was named the best in the world five times and held three Michelin stars from 1997.
This work documents the final six years, from 2005 to 2011, in seven volumes totalling 2,720 pages and weighing 20 kilos. Every dish is recorded with a number, year and Ferran and Albert Adrià's own notes on how it came about. Over the restaurant's entire lifetime, nearly 1,900 dishes were catalogued in this way, which is about as close as cooking gets to a laboratory record.
The final dinner was served on 30 July 2011 and elBulli became a foundation. Nobody cooks from this. It is a record of the restaurant that changed everything.
Format: Hardback in seven volumes
Number of pages: 2720
Language: English
First published: 2014
The Kitchen Lab Selection
elBulli was the most consequential restaurant of modern times, and this is the archive of its final years. No restaurant will document itself this way again, which makes the work impossible to replace. elBulli also became world gastronomy's clear new star and drove a modernist development that displaced France as the obvious culinary centre. Its impact turned the whole world's attention elsewhere and then cleared the way for Noma and the new Scandinavian school as the reference point for chefs everywhere.
