Paleo Retiree writes:

A German hagiography-documentary about the last season of creating-and-serving at El Bulli, the famous restaurant on the Costa Brava (outside of Barcelona) that was sometimes said to have been the world’s greatest. The movie is an impressively somber, narration-free art-thing in its own right, designed, machined and tooled to a deep, dark Euro-polish. It’s in the reserved, reverential style of a Mercedes ad. The high-end hush is meant to suggest that we’re in the presence of genius — it’s like an official visit to Pierre Boulez at IRCAM. The genius the film is enshrining is the restaurant’s chef, Ferran Adrià, and as slick as it is, the film is mainly of interest for its subject matter: its look at his innovative approach to food, its exploration of how his restaurant worked, and the glimpses it offers of Adrià himself.

During its time, El Bulli was one of the temples of “molecular gastronomy” — super-untraditional dining experiences created from food that has been monkeyed-with in deep ways by chemistry and tools to achieve strange new flavors and textures. (In discussions of molecular gastronomy the word “foam” comes up a lot.) During the opening section of the film, we’re with a few of Adrià’s young general-chefs as they try to create new dishes for the upcoming season. With their weird, un-kitchen-like tools and experimental methods, it’s more like a session among scientists than among chefs. (There’s hardly any garlic-chopping or sauté’ing on display.) The film then moves to the restaurant as it prepares itself for opening day. (El Bulli had a very limited season, took reservations six months to a year in advance, and never turned a profit.) The discipline is authoritarian and the precision is exacting. The place existed, we’re being shown, less as a conventional restaurant than as an emanation of Ferran Adrià’s severe and poetic vision. Everything at El Bulli was in place in order to please him.

Ferran Adrià himself is a fascinating if opaque character. (He’s never interviewed in the film — we see lots of him, but always at a slight distance.) He’s small, hunched-over, a little bug-eyed, and not very articulate. His rhythms are blurting and spikey. For communication, he relies heavily on his two or three second-in-commands. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like; he expresses his pleasure or displeasure bluntly; and his supreme, oft-restated goal is for the food at El Bulli to be surprising and dazzling. He’s quite explicit about being an innovate-or-die avant-gardist, ever in search of far-out sensations; he’s known for such sayings as “Cuisine is not something to be had, but a state to be in.” He’s such a little gnome of balled-up brilliance and drive that he reminded me of what Beethoven is said to have been like. The Question Lady and I found ourselves wondering if he might not be on the spectrum.

Then there’s the question of the food itself. Were El Bulli’s creations really the hyper-inventive, jewel-like, mind-and-palate-opening explosions of beauty the film (and Ferran Adrià’s fans) have made them out to be? Sadly, The Question Lady and I will never know the real answer. I can report, though, that as a viewing experience Adrià’s food made our stomachs gurgle much more happily when we watched an episode about El Bulli on Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” than it did here. Bourdain’s gonzo-journalist approach made the food seem zanily irresistible. In this film’s smooth, modern-establishment setting it struck us as off-putting — plasticky and artificial, more about lab chemistry than the earth. (Interesting to learn online that some of his critics say that Adrià is irresponsible where safety is concerned, and accuse his food of being unhealthy.) The Question Lady, an excellent home cook, tells me that — although video visits to the kitchens of top chefs nearly always strike her as sexy — the viewing time we spent with Ferran Adrià’s food wasn’t a turn-on. In my own more free-associating moments, the El Bulli thang reminded me of up-to-date Euro-architecture, even of the European Union itself. It represents forward-looking, ambitiously “beautiful” Euro-genius of a kind that I tend to find oppressive and absurd.

As dignified as the movie was and as inventive as Adrià’s food was, everything about the time we spent watching the movie felt awfully high-stress. After it was over we found ourselves dialing up Eric Ripert’s TV cooking show “Avec Eric” for some relief.  (The show is free to watch on Amazon Instant for Prime subscribers; you can also find episodes of it on YouTube.) Ripert — a legend in foodie circles for his Manhattan seafood restaurant Le Bernardin — does traditional-but-kicked-up-a-notch French cooking with casual, earthy elegance. While the show itself suffers a bit from inane PBS good taste, Ripert himself is expansive, friendly, unhurried, enthusiastic, and focused on pleasure-giving of a familiar-but-freshened-up sort. Thanks to his show, our stomachs were able to start gurgling happily again.

More

• “El Bulli” the documentary is currently viewable on Netflix Instant.
• El Bulli the restaurant has transmogrified into a foundation dedicated to, you guessed it, creativity.
• Reserve a table at Le Bernardin. I’ve eaten there once — thank you, old-media expense accounts. It may not have been remotely avant-garde, but it really was great.
• Eric Ripert’s very generous website.