Ferran Adrià

He’s been compared to Salvador Dalì, Jacques Derrida, Auguste, Louis Lumière and Diego Armando Maradona. Others said he is just the best chef in the world or in our history. Whatever they say, Ferran Adrià is the revolutionary author that changed the face of contemporary cuisine. A mix of junk food and philosophy, contemporary art and scornful laughs, celebrating postmodern exercises of languages, genres, registers.
Funnily enough, all this happened accidentally… Yes because, as a young boy, food was for Ferran no more than a boring necessity. On a summer holidays he flew to Ibiza and started working as a dish-washer in a restaurant held by a friend. That was an unexpected debut, without dazzling experience but one: the reading of Practico, the bible of spanish cuisine, learned by heart as a book of prayer and even today available on the Barcelona taller. From Ibiza to Barcelona, up to Finisterre, a maison nouvelle cuisine, coking for him is just a lazy job, until his military service.  Head chef for the first time, Ferran starts supervising the supplies, studying the French philosophy of the auctoritas Robert Lafont and, above all, he gets to know the providential figure Fermì Puig, today at work at Hotel Majestic’s Drolma in Barcelona, but at that time working at El Bulli (which was then two-starred like Arzak).

Fermì suggests Ferran to work with him for a while. And the acceleration is impressive: Adrià enter Roses doorstep on august 1983, he’s engaged on december, on march 1984 he’s the fish chef de partie and in October the far-sighted Juli Soler offers him the chef throne.
Soon after, the chef enriches further his vocabulary with Georges Blanc’theory («absolutely one of the best chef in the world», says Ferran) and Jacques Maximin’s sentence «creativity means not copying».

All the rest is a story of thousands recipes and 6 thousands pages of books, deconstructions, stop-and-go between high cuisine and food industry, figurative and mimetic games, foams, airs and provocations.
These years his cooking meant everything, its opposite and the opposite of the opposite. We cannot to trap his fast-moving job in an architecture of concepts. His last exercise is called naturaleza: a u-turn towards green minimalism that, more than anything else, set vanguard baroque superfetations free.