Albert Adrià has been recognised as the second best chef in the world. This is the headline that everyone is celebrating except me. You don’t have to understand much about cooking or literature to know that this is not a recognition but an insult. Rasmus Munk of the Alchemist restaurant in Copenhagen was chosen as the first chef.
It is a serious insult, which concerns us, and for which Albert Adrià and his brother Ferran are partly to blame. Together they went to the Danish restaurant to cook with this Munk and gave prestige to the circus mixed with an empty and opportunistic cuisine that is the opposite of what they did at El Bulli, both in the dishes and in the philosophy that inspired them. It is a humiliation to what El Bulli was and what Enigma is today that a restaurant like Alchemist has any kind of preponderance in haute cuisine. It might have it in the high circus, but not in a discipline that the Adrià brothers elevated to artistic.
It is not a proper treatment of El Bulli’s legacy to patronise a restaurant that relies on projecting images on screens and making obvious dishes like an eye that looks at you without anything substantial inside.
El Bulli’s merit was always to be essential. There was never anything gratuitous, nothing that did not have a deep, poetic meaning and that was justified by art and talent. There was never any concession to cheap spectacle, nor to sterile filigree. As you can imagine, the temptations were enormous because it was all so revolutionary that it was difficult to distinguish what it was to never stray from the first dawn of the game for the sake of the game, which could be so much fun -and fatuous- as a result of such creativity and discovery. But Ferran was implacable, not a single concession. Those were the most creatively significant years in Spain since the Generation of ‘27. Ferran Adrià was the most important living artist of his time.
Alchemist means quite the opposite, and it is worrying that it should be associated with the cuisine that Albert Adrià makes at Enigma, the most important and creative cuisine in the world today. It is serious that it is done and it is even more serious that the Adrià brothers have allowed it. Both Albert and Ferran must understand that it is not their right to manage the legacy of El Bulli but their duty to do so; and participating in the comedy of Alchemist is not an acceptable way to carry out this mission.
And it is not a question of vanity or the race to see who gets there first. It is a question of the playing field. It is a question of defining what is creativity and what is banal artifice to gain money and fame in the name of creativity. Ferran and Albert Adrià made sensational dishes, but what they above all contributed to the history of humanity, what they above all meant for human progress, cultural of course, but not only, was to defy nature with olives that were better than those on the tree.
Long before the rhetorical debate on climate change arose, Ferran Adrià surpassed divine creation itself with intelligence and talent. He took tradition and exploded it with his vision, not only of cuisine but of the world. It was the most important break with the classical since cubism. It was not a circus. He was not a poor boy from L’Hospitalet playing kitchenettes. He was one of the most important artists in history, and this cannot be put next to Danish affectionates who give you a little something and say it’s creative because the restaurant is in the dark and on one of the walls they show you a video of a little turtle that has eaten a piece of plastic and try to raise awareness about the dangers of whatever nonsense that we could care less about, in general, but above all when we’re talking about art.
El Bulli closed years ago but we all continue to depend on El Bulli. In all aspects of the world’s creative life, El Bulli is fundamental, among other things because neither its revolution nor its language have been surpassed in cuisine or in any other artistic discipline. Such mudslinging as appearing next to Alchemist, and even below it, trivialises what should be sacred.
