An entire day in Barcelona, on a Tuesday in June, the 27th, all dedicated to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, all to celebrate their 15th anniversary: first a visit to the El Bulli laboratory with Ferran Adrià; then a talkshow at the Antigua Fabrica Estrella Damm again with the Catalan chef, who was 5 times number one in the world – followed by René Redzepi, four, Joan Roca, two, Massimo Bottura, one, in 2016 in New York, like Daniel Humm and Will Guidara last April in Melbourne. American Thomas Keller, first in 2004, and English Heston Blumenthal, who won the following year, did not come. And after using my hands and mouth to write and speak, the same came useful to celebrate a lunch marked by tapas on the terrace of W Barcelona in Barceloneta.
Spain was shining, with massive investments so as to make sure that a Spanish chef will be back at number one. In Australia, the Roca brothers were third (and Bottura was second), too little. Hence the Basque Country will host the award giving ceremony in 2018 between San Sebastian and Bilbao, and Barcelona and Catalunia hosted this party
with important invitations, especially among the one thousand voters (they were around seventy, fifteen years ago) because one should judge the restaurant, and not just the patron-chef. And you have to visit the place. Dinner-events and pop-up restaurants around the globe are not enough. They give colour, create the news, you can enjoy them but they cannot count when voting. We're not playing in the backyard where kids make up their own rules.
All this activity in terms of regional-national systems and lobbies (in a positive, American sense) make Bottura bitter, as he knows very well you need to be there, with facts and not just simple words, often void, if you want to be a protagonist in the global challenge.
Adrià played the magical flute first at home, then in public. In the words of Joan Roca: «Thanks Ferran, you're the number one of all, among many number ones, and you'll always be». After closing El Bulli in July 2011 (six years have already gone by,
it's incredible), between the late 2018 and early 2019 he wants to open on its ashes, also in Cala Montjoi, the foundation, a centre of comprehensive 360° innovation. «We'll research all sorts of topics, ready to accept every offer as long as it's legal. But the real heritage of the restaurant is made of the 2500 people who worked there, the so called bullinianos. In 1999, for instance,
Redzepi,
Bottura and
Grant Achatz were there, and even I was an intern there earlier on».
The chef from Modena agreed: «Ferran was a very harsh boss. We were working 17 hours per day but we all had the strong feeling we were changing the world». This helps not making you feel the effort, which would be intolerable if you thought it was useless. You can understand well what Bulli used to be when you walk around the laboratory, where the Catalan chef is archiving everything that belonged to the restaurant, including the first service of soup serving bowls, cutlery and silver trays, a classic luxury that is opposite to what we've been used to for the past twenty years thanks to his very revolution.
And on the 27th the theme was the
Future of Gastronomy which
Bulli knew well and I would have liked this to be the focus of all the speeches, not just the one given by
Bottura, with his usual strong social vision and appeal, and of
Redzepi, whose invitation to eat nature inside and around cities –
Vild mad that is to say wild food – is an ideal return to the caves. Between pulling out roots from the soil and pulling out foie gras from the geese there are centuries of authentich thought-after cuisine, popular and noble, ephimeral and concrete, more or less craveable, new ideas as well as a continued take on what's known, an evergreen.
