Ferran Adrià: 'We're creating a genome of cuisine'
Some time in 1989, a 27-year-old chef working in a renovated beach shack on the north-east coast of Spain, decided to play around with one of his country's signature dishes. "What," he asked himself, "makes a gazpacho a gazpacho?"
Instead of whirring up the tomato, bread, cucumbers and peppers into a smooth, cold puree, he separated the elements at the bottom of a plate, added some slices of lobster, and had a waiter add liquid at the table.
Twenty years – and many enquiries into the nature of soup later – that gazpacho con bogavante seems unexceptional. But in its interrogation of a classic, the dish was the start of a revolution that would utterly change fine dining.
Ferran Adrià is the most influential chef of our time. That may seem a preposterous claim for a man who started his career as a cook in the navy, and whose restaurant – his sole restaurant, it should be pointed out in these days of far-flung culinary empires – only seated 50 people a night at the height of its renown. And yet, as René Redzepi, chef of Copenhagen's highly regarded Noma, has said, "He changed everything."
He did it by asking questions. Not just "What makes gazpacho gazpacho?" but also "Why does sweet come after savoury?" and "What happens if I attach a bicycle pump to a tomato?"
He is best known for his outlandish, delicious creations – turning mango juice into a semi-solid "caviar", using liquid nitrogen to create frozen globes of coconut milk – but his real contribution was to see every ingredient and technique's possibilities in a new way.
"What we did is to reconceptualise," he likes to say. "The Romans wore their togas above their knees, but it took Mary Quant to reconceptualise that fashion as the mini skirt."
At its height, el Bulli was receiving close to 2 million booking requests per year. Just as highly in demand were unpaid apprentice positions in his kitchen. Each year, thousands of young cooks from around the world applied for the 35 slots, and many of those who made it, including Redzepi, Massimo Bottura, Jason Atherton and Andoni Luis Aduriz, went on to become leading chefs in their own right.
All were profoundly changed by the experience. Alex Atala, chef of São Paulo's DOM, currently ranked sixth on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, says: "He gave me the courage to become myself."
Adrià closed el Bulli as a restaurant in July 2011. Since then, he's been busy remaking it as a foundation dedicated to gastronomy and creativity. The foundation's first project is a massive compendium called Bullipedia, which seeks to unite all knowledge about ingredients, cooking techniques and culinary history into one open-source database.
"It's a monster," Adrià says. "We're creating a genome of cuisine."
Adrià intends the El Bulli Foundation to foster creativity – that ineffable quality that is his great legacy. In addition to the Bullipedia, it will house a museum and sponsor a scholarship program to bring young cooks from around the world to experiment with cooking's possibilities.
He is also working on several books (his latest, a catalogue raisonée of the recipes developed at el Bulli between 2005 and 2011, is out next spring) and exhibitions. He is even in discussions about a project that he describes enigmatically as "a step forward", in the exploration of what a restaurant can be if it's not a restaurant.
"Everything I've done while el Bulli was open as a restaurant is just a drop," he says, "compared with what is to come."
Lisa Abend is the author of The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen of Ferran Adrià's el Bulli (Simon & Schuster, £8.99)
ElBulli 2005-2011 is published by Phaidon and is scheduled to be released March 2014. It will retail for £425.