Towards the end of El Bulli - Cooking in Progress the head chef Ferran Adriá speaks to the restaurant's group of new recruits. "What is the concept here?" he asks. Adriá and his sous chefs are introducing the new season's menu to the young chefs tasked with its creation. And he might as well be posing the question to us.
"Going to eat in an avant-garde restaurant gives you something like a creative emotion. It's not just about, 'Mmm, tastes good.' You feel something… This dish is based on an idea." Adriá's explanation would serve as a good guide to anyone not familiar with molecular gastronomy. The Catalan restaurant elBulli was considered a mecca for this style of cooking - and Adriá its forerunner. This isn't your mother's cooking, and the contrasts with our expectations of food is largely the point.
Gereon Wetzel's documentary offers us a behind-the-scenes journey that begins with the restaurant's annual pack-up and move from the sleepy seaside town of Roses to Barcelona, where the chefs set-up not quite a kitchen but something more like a lab. We accompany the sous chefs to the local markets as they collect the raw materials for their creations. And back in the kitchen we see their daily exploration evolve into the year's menu. The process is sometimes playful but largely serious, and the methodical documentation, ordering, and consideration of what they discover is fascinating.
Months later, we travel back to the restaurant where the dishes are implemented by the year's new chefs in something akin to a military operation. The method is exacting and Adriá is often unforgiving. But there is magic. As he samples a dish, Adriá's eyes fix onto those of his chefs' with a wide-eyed stare, and we seem to witness his mind set fire. Wetzel catches that moment when the master's creation makes him feel that something.
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