There’s a moment in the animated film Ratatouille when the ghost of an haute-cuisine chef turns to Remy the Rat, that unlikely foodie, and says: ‘Anyone can cook.’ OK, this is a kid’s film about a talking rodent – but it’s still true, anyone can cook, and we do. So it’s a craft that we rarely even consider. Nevertheless, some people take it past the ordinary and far beyond the highest expectation – and of those few, Ferran Adrià is the master. Not, I must confess at the outset, that I have eaten a crumb Adrià’s cooked, but take it from those who have: Joel Robuchon calls him the 'best on the planet’; to Heston Blumenthal, ‘Ferran’s a genius. Without a doubt, he’s had the biggest influence on modern gastronomy of any chef alive.’ So he’s good, you see.
Adrià is head chef at El Bulli, a restaurant in northern Spain with three Michelin stars, that has topped the prestigious Restaurant magazine best-in-the-world list five times. But this is a marker of his success, not the reason for it – which is creativity. The 47-year old chef is often compared to fellow Spaniards Picasso and Dali (who used to live down the road, his agent a regular at El Bulli during the 70s – ‘El Bulli’ as it was then, long before Adrià arrived).
Many feel intense reverence towards him – hence the comparison with fine artists rather than chefs. Like Dali’s, like Picasso’s, El Bulli's output is beautiful and revolutionary – textures and flavours are inverted, what looks cold is hot, you expect solid but you get liquid, nothing is as it seems. A coiled spring of virgin olive oil caramel; flowers trapped in candy floss; ravioli made not from pasta but calamari meat, filled with a warm gel of coconut, mint and ginger. The textures, temperatures and flavours at El Bulli are intended to surprise and entertain. Adrià enjoys hearing his customers laughing - and there are all too few chefs who think haute cuisine should be funny.
He’s not what you expect in other ways, either. The idea of the chef has been so caricatured in recent years – we’ve come to expect capitalist machismo or cultural pretension – yet Adrià is friendly, vital, passionate and eager to engage in anything and everything. He tells me he’s done a thousand interviews, speeches or panel discussions over the past year, a level of activity that astonishes me. He talks fast - the interpreter finds it difficult to keep up – as though there is not enough time in the day to get his points across.
We are here to discuss his work at Documenta 12, the major German art fair, in 2007. The fair was in Kassel but Pavilion G was El Bulli in Spain: each day two visitors were selected to go to the restaurant, which many hadn’t heard of. This collaboration resulted in a book, Food for Thought, Thought for Food, edited by artist Richard Hamilton, a lifelong El Bulli devotee, and Tate Modern director Vicente Todoli.
So with the art world courting him, does he consider himself an artist? ‘I’m a cook and I do very beautiful things. We don’t know why the art world hadn’t taken a dialogue with avant-garde cooking before. From that perspective, I’m very happy this dialogue has taken place. But chef will be chef, sculptor will be sculptor and painter will be painter.’ In recent years he’s been called an artist, a magician, a mad scientist, an inventor, but ask Adrià and he’ll say he’s a cook; not a chef, a cook. It’s not actually the first time the art world has come knocking, but it is the first time he’s responded so strongly. Before he’d simply say, ‘I’m happy to help, but I’m not going to do your work for you.’