Food Science Ferran Adrià Is Ready For Elbulli's Next Step—A Creativity Lab

"Part Of What We Want is to better understand how creativity works".

- Lisa Abend

THE GREAT CHEF—perhaps the greatest of all time—stands at the kitchen pass, his hair an unruly halo, his gaze as intense as ever. Outside, the pale March sun still sets the Spanish Mediterranean to sparkling; the ancient pines still hold their ground against the tramontane winds that blow south across the Pyrenees from France and down the headland to the cove at Cala Montjoi. But inside there is no longer a team of 45 cooks working in silent precision over their tasks, no fragile spherified olives being coaxed onto spoons, or coconut milk “dinosaur eggs” trailing liquid nitrogen smoke. Instead, there is only rubble. Making himself an espresso from the one piece of equipment not covered in a thick layer of dust, the chef notices my expression. “You’re emotional because you’re thinking about what it was,” he says. “But I’m thinking about what it’s about to become.”

Ferran Adrià has been thinking about what elBulli will become for a long while now. When in 2011 he closed the restaurant that many consider the most influential of our time, in order to reopen it as a kind of culinary think tank, he could not have imagined the obstacles to come. It’s only now, three years late and a little battered, that his vision is finally becoming reality.

“It’s not about gastronomy,” Adrià says, as he steps outside to observe the construction that is transforming his former restaurant into elBulli 1846, a research lab and exhibition space. (The name derives from the number of recipes elBulli developed between 1983 and 2011.) “It’s about innovation in general. Gastronomy is just the platform we’re using to explore innovation.”