Chef-alchemist Ferran Adrià changed the world… forever. It didn’t happen in one seismic shift, but in a series of yearly aftershocks that created a new modernist gastronomic language. His culinary journey began in 1987 at the restaurant elBulli on Cala Montjoi, a small picturesque bay on the Catalan coast near Roses, Spain, just down the road from Dalí’s Port Lligat. In 2011, when elBulli closed at the height of its fame, it had served 1,846 different dishes, won decades of Michelin stars and acclaim from Restaurant magazine as the world’s No. 1, and amassed a 2 million-person waiting list for 8,000 seats a season.
Adrià’s endless, avant-garde culinary creativity is the subject of the new special exhibition, Ferran Adrià: The Invention of Food, at the Dalí Museum through Nov. 27 (food enthusiasts hungry for more should read our complementary Q&A with the chef). Elements of the show have previously been exhibited in world capitals Barcelona (2012), London (2013), New York (2014) and Buenos Aires (2016). So downtown St. Pete is in rare company.
But unless you follow modernist cuisine, you'll need context to understand the exhibit. Without some homework, the displays might as well be elBullisaurus Rex.
Watching Adrià eat along with Bourdain, you see the childlike pleasure he gets from sharing his ephemeral creations. Most dishes arrive on custom-made plates designed to present an individual course. Quite often you eat with your fingers instead of utensils. Or, there’s a single spoon or similar custom-designed vessel that cradles a lone bit for you to pop into your mouth. Ferran smiles with impish glee as he watches Tony’s reaction. He’s the mad scientist waiting for the recognition on your face in response to something you’ve never before experienced. Ultimately, Adrià wants diners to have as much fun as he’s having.
You can also do your own research at the exhibition itself, where you'll find 12 handsome volumes full of stunning photos documenting how all 1,846 one-of-a-kind dishes were put together. What you can’t experience from pictures alone is how cinematic Adrià’s vision is. The progression and pacing of each meal is deliberate, with specific juxtapositions meant to disorient the diner. In addition to our senses (all of them), the chef wants to challenge our intellect by taking us on a bewildering journey. An Adrià meal is an evening of surprise — things are not what they seem. There’s pasta-less and vanishing ravioli, liquid nitrogen cocktails, aerosol spaghetti, hot gelatin, carrot-mandarin air, chocolate soil, foil gras powder, and on and on.
With this grounding, you’ll understand the show's hour-long archival video of a complete 36-course meal. It’s an overhead shot, projected on a video-screen “table.” You hear the ambient noise of the restaurant and see the servers taking diners through a multi-sensory, four-hour experience in a condensed two-dimensional form for eyes and ears alone. Though the complete list of courses for the meal is posted on the gallery wall, more explication is needed for us really to understand Adrià’s genius. Luckily, all the dishes are numbered, and we can look them up individually in the 2007 volume at the far right end of the room.
In the center of the gallery are eight pairs of photos demonstrating nature as a prime source of Adrià’s inspiration. The food photos by elBulli’s longtime photographer Francesc Guillamet are stunning. Unlike most current food photography, in which meals are shown on site with shallow depth of field, these photos are crystal-clear, posed images of culinary supermodels. Without consulting the books, though, you have no idea of the edible contents.
The largest area of the gallery houses a behind-the-curtain video triptych loop that shows liquid nitrogen at work, ambient sounds of a world-class kitchen with meticulous attention to detail in all things, and sorcerer Adrià tasting for his apprentices and giving a thumbs up. It ends, of course, with an empty kitchen — shiny and pristine as service concludes.
On the back wall of the exhibit is a 10-foot-by-35-foot projection that sequences the 1,846 dishes from elBulli in 16 minutes. Sadly, we can’t taste, but it’s a feast for the eyes. The cascade of images in a rectangular grid of 224 undulating squares reminds us of the amazing breadth and scope of Adrià’s particular genius.
The Invention of Food is really a cultural anthropology and archeology exhibit, full of utensils, binders, sketches and unique serving pieces that hint at a lost gastronomic civilization gone extinct by choice five years ago. We can’t travel in time to live beside the elBullisaurus. But we can see where the mythical creature roamed, artifacts of the glorious world that it left behind, and indecipherable notebooks full of hieroglyphics that let us glance into the meticulous planning of a creative mind that envisions meals with precise order, pace and flow.
Like other contemporary visual art, there’s irony, humor, decontextualization, surprise, memory and deception in these works. However, this artist’s medium is food. Every year Adrià’s team spent six months in their Barcelona workshop researching pioneering techniques to create an entirely new menu for elBulli’s season, asking, “What if cooking did not exist? What could it be?”
If you come prepared, the exhibition provides thrilling insight to those questions.
And by the way, if all this food imagery makes you hungry, Dalí museum director Hank Hine overruled the greasy fingers fears of his curators to offer a gourmet treat as you enter the exhibition: a taste of Pata Negra ham, or jamón Ibérico de bellota, the wonderful Spanish product made from acorn-fed pigs. It’s served from 11a.m. to 3 p.m. daily till supplies run out.
Ferran Adrià: The Invention of Food
The Dalí Museum, 1 Dali Blvd., St. Petersburg, through Nov. 27. 727-823-3767; thedali.org. At press time, tickets were still available for three of the seven Immersion Dinners, in which local chefs pay homage to Adria through special menus and wine pairings. Find out more online.
This article appears in Oct 6-13, 2016.