Ferran Adria: a man with a very big plan
Three years after closing his El Bulli restaurant, chef Ferran Adria finds himself busier than ever, writes Susan Jung
Ferran Adria is answering questions at the "In Conversation With …" event held earlier this month at the Kelly & Walsh bookstore in Pacific Place, and I, as chief moderator, get the signal that we have five minutes to wind things down. Fellow moderator Fergus Fung (one of the founders of food magazine WOM Guide), asks a seemingly simple question, "Can you tell us more about Bullipedia?"
The short answer could have taken five minutes. But Adria doesn't give the short answer. Instead, he grabs a marker and sketches outlines of the Americas, Africa, Europe, Australia and Asia on a whiteboard behind us, saying, "In order to understand Bullipedia, we need to study how the world began …"
Twenty minutes later, after taking us through the neolithic period (when clay was created, and our ancestors started using it to make cooking utensils), the birth of agriculture and ranching, the origin of beer (not in Belgium, as many people believe, but in Egypt), the Roman civilisation and a lot of other subjects, Adria says, "At Bullipedia, what are we trying to do? We want you to understand all this. The job we're doing at Bullipedia is to see how to archive all this information."
By "all this information", Adria means everything the world knows about cuisine.
Adria, in case you didn't know, is arguably the most creative and influential chef in the Western world. For five years, his restaurant, El Bulli, in Roses, Spain, topped the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. It was open for only six months of the year, receiving up to two million requests for the 8,000 covers available each season.
Watch: Ferran Adria speaks with Susan Jung