Ferran Adrià's Vision to Change World, Advice for New Cooks
When the tiny but influential Omnivore Books announced they were hosting an event featuring Ferran Adrià, most people stared at their iPhones in awe. Could it be true? So, it was no surprise that El Bulli’s legendary chef spoke to a sold-out crowd at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco on Monday night.
An enthusiastic ‘who’s who’ of the San Francisco foodie scene wrapped around the corner on a rainy night as they waited to enter the theatre and listen to Adrià discuss his new book The Family Meal and also share some insight about life after El Bulli. Famous for bringing molecular gastronomy into the foodie vocabulary and named the best restaurant in the world for a record 5-times by renowned Restaurant Magazine, El Bulli served its ‘last supper’ on July 30, 2011 in order to “keep creating” as Adrià put it.
Before discussing his new vision, The El Bulli Foundation, set to open in 2014, Adrià presented to the crowd like he may have to his students as a visiting professor at Harvard. Charts, simple yet complicated analogies, and multi media presentations – all of which probably surprised many who didn’t know quite what to expect. Adrià shared his thoughts on creativity, innovation and finding a place in history while cracking jokes laced with saucy Castilian language that his translator neglected to repeat in English. It was an extra treat for those of us who understood Spanish in the audience.
When asked about today’s decline in home cooking by moderator, Lisa Abend, author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, Adrià commented “we are hypocrites.” He thought it was ridiculous how people cited ‘no time’ as an excuse for not cooking while the average person watched 3 hours of TV a night. He insisted that learning how to cook was like learning anything else, “like learning to use your first iPod,” he said. It takes “will power” and a little bit of invested time to learn.
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