“Cuisine is a Language” — Ferran Adria and Anthony Bourdain at NYCWFF
Ferran Adria, head of el Bulli (widely regarded as the best restaurant in the world), doesn’t make too many public appearances. So when it was announced that one of the events at the NYC Wine & Food Festival would be a panel discussion with both Adria and Anthony Bourdain I was very excited. Luckily for all of us Bourdain let Adria (and his translator) take center stage, and it led to an incredibly entertaining afternoon.
Adria began by apologizing for not being able to cook for us — he explained that he would like to, but it just wasn’t realistic. Since he didn’t want to disappoint the audience, he instead showed a short film about the el Bulli experience. The film itself was a little over the top, but later he explained that the two diners featured in the video were to actual customers who dine at the restaurant one a year. They had no idea that the footage was being shown to us.
Adria was excited about the release of his new book, A Day at el Bulli, because it was published by Phaidon, a publisher of serious art books. He said that cuisine is too often overlooked as high culture, although things are getting better (as evidenced by the new book).
Adria had a few things he wanted to make clear about what he continually called “avant-garde” cuisine. The first was that there is more to cuisine than technique. A truly great dining experience involves a dialogue between the diner and the chef — hence the quote in the title. As Bourdain pointed out, many people go to these kind of restaurants with a “hostile attitude.” The “burden” of diners, he said, was to go with “an open mind, and open heart… and a sense of humor.” As I experienced at Per Se, some cuisine can make you feel emotions: fear, delight, confusion, enlightenment. Cuisine, said Bourdain, can be world changing.
There are only a few restaurants, according to Adria, which are successfully doing something along the same lines as el Bulli. He made special mention of his friend Jose Andres, who was sitting at the front of the audience. Bourdain thought that what many restaurants were lacking was the cultural background that the Catalonians have, since they are surrounded by the greatest products and food in the world.
Adria also told us tat he did not like the discussion of “scientific” cooking methods that many people focus on. He pointed out that science is in everything, and that cooking with liquid nitrogen, for example, is not really that strange. People always ooh and ah when they see the steam rising from the nitrogen, but no one is impressed by boiling water, though they are basically the same chemical reaction (liquid converting to gas). He said that products like xanthan gum sounds exotic, but is a natural product. He said that everything is relative; if someone said they were going to cook fish with sodium chloride it would sound “scientific,” though of course sodium chloride is ordinary salt. He also pointed out that flour and sugar are not truly natural products, but are the end result of a process.
Some of the discussion revolved around whether home cooks would ever be able to cook the way they do at el Bulli. One of the audience members even brought up Texturas, a product developed by Ferran and his brother Albert, which does bring some of the technical products from el Bulli into home kitchens. Adria said that there was always crossover between home cooking and high cuisine — he mentioned bechamel as something that went from restaurants to homes, and gazpacho as something that originated as a peasant dish that is now served in many restaurants. However, he said that there would always be a difference, a necessary difference, between restaurant and home cooking.
The discussion was followed by a wine tasting (with Godiva Chocolate) and a book signing. I was impressed that the signing line for Ferran Adria was longer than the line for Anthony Bourdain. Only at an event like this would that be true.
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