Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti Read Free Book Online Page A

nearly every innovativeyoung chef in Paris and Milan and New York, and made Ferran Adrià famous in foodie circles, as much for striking out a new course in cuisine as for the whimsy of how he’d done it. But today at his restaurant, less than five years later, Ferran is almost dismissive of those foams, using them sparingly. “It’s not so conscious,” he told me in his kitchen, the first time we met. “It’s just that we opened a path and now that path is open. We may not serve any foams next year. Most restaurants are museums, but not El Bulli.” I asked him what El Bulli was all about, then. He considered for a moment, then gestured at the white-coated chefs chopping like sped-up metronomes. “El Bulli is crazy,” he said. “It’s the drunkenness of all the new things that can be.”
    4. [APHORISMS FROM THE PROFESSOR]
    “Painting, music, movies, sculpture, theater, everything—we can survive without it,” Ferran said. “You have to eat, or else you die. Food is the only obligatory emotion.”
    “The taste of a lemon is incredible!”
    “There are eight degrees between warm and cold.”
    “You must always eat with two hands.”
    “I prefer to spend my money on a bottle of champagne at the Ritz in Paris than on a pair of shoes. I’ll always remember the champagne. I’ll never remember the shoes.”
    “The tomato is American.”
    “The prawn head is Spanish.”
    “In the end everything already exists; we’re not inventors of anything. But this is the definition of creativity. It’s seeing what other people don’t see.”
    “Laughing brings out the good in food. It’s good to laugh. If you don’t laugh, you’re going to magnify. And if you magnify, you’re going to die.”
    “The important thing is the miniskirt, not what color it is.”
    5. [CONCERNING THE EFFECT OF TOMATO HEARTS ON WEDDED DISCOURSE]
    One afternoon Carlos and I took the long drive into the mountains along the Mediterranean toward El Bulli. Up there everyone vanished, the sky came closer, the sea sparkled. If it was treacherous to drive the hairpins and potholes, it was suddenly much easier to breathe. Later, when I asked Ferran to describe the perfect meal, he stressed that there had to be magic in arrival. That it had to be a place hard to get to or somehow earned. That the journey, more than any appetizer or cocktail, would remind you of your hunger.
    Now it was time to eat. Carlos and I had been invited to have lunch in the kitchen so we could taste and watch at the same time. It felt like an exploratory mission, a warm-up to the main event, which would come a few nights later. We were seated at a wide wooden table with two place settings and a couple of wine goblets full of light. We were asked if we had any allergies (none) and then came the welcome cocktail, what the waiter called a “hot-cold margarita.” When I picked it up, the glass was partly warm and partly cool to the touch, since by some process the drink had been both heated and chilled at once. The margarita was tangy and airy, and the temperature difference, the movement from hot to cold, created a tumbling sensation, a tequila wave with a triple sec undertow, ending on one arctic, sweet note. We were startled into smiles.
    And though whimsy has made Ferran Adrià famous, one soon realizes that a meal at El Bulli is driven by calculation and logic, coordinated through the phalanx of chefs at their various stations. Each guest eats roughly two dozen dishes, and if the diner simply rises to go to the bathroom, she can break an almost sacred rhythm that Ferran feels is crucial to the meal, to the variations in temperature and texture that help give his food its character.“The plate is a song,” he says. “If the harmony is too slow, the person who receives the plate isn’t receiving what the chef intended. There’s a rhythm that’s hard to explain, but it changes everything.” Ferran’s sense of time, then, guides the journey of every morsel from