BACK TO THE CHOPPING BOARD

WHY WOULD A chef who is experienced enough to run his own kitchen take three months leave from his job for an unpaid position cleaning floors and being treated like a young trainee?

If you are at all familiar with the top names of the culinary world, then Gianluigi Bonelli's decision is not hard to understand. For Bonelli, executive chef of Central's Kee Club, spent his time at Spain's legendary Michelin three-star restaurant El Bulli, whose chef, Ferran Adria, is considered the most creative in the world.

Adria is often called the Dali of cuisine, a surrealist who likes to take people's conceptions of food and shock them from their complacency. But Michelin inspectors don't give stars just for creativity - the food, reportedly, is exquisite.

El Bulli, in the town of Roses on the Spanish Costa Brava, is open just six months of the year; the rest of the time Adria travels to Barcelona and experiments in his kitchen 'atelier'. His most famous creations are ethereal sweet and savoury foams that disappear on the tongue, and jellies that stay solid when warm. The 30 or more dinner courses are served over several hours. Getting a table at the 55-seat El Bulli is tantamount to scoring tickets to the World Cup final. Reservations, taken by e-mail, fax and phone, open at midnight on January 15. Within about a week, the restaurant is fully booked for the year. There's always a waiting list of people who are willing to fly to Spain at a week's notice if there's a cancellation.

Bonelli, 31, learned in January that he was one of just 14 chefs - from more than 5,000 applicants annually - to be given the chance to train with the master. He was there for three months from the end of March, and worked mostly with Adria's pastry chef brother, Albert, in the pastry and tapas station. His day started at 11.30am, helping Albert 'create new stuff. Then at 1.30pm or 2pm we'd start prepping for the whole day until around 6pm. We'd stop for about 20 minutes for cigarettes or dinner, and then start getting ready for the service, which started at 8pm. Then we'd clean the kitchen at around 1.30am, then go home.'

To learn their profession, young cooks just starting out often take unpaid positions, and stories within the industry are rife of apprentices spending weeks peeling vegetables and scrubbing pots before being entrusted with more difficult jobs.

'I can say with 100 per cent certainty that nobody in Hong Kong with a good job and good salary would leave to go to Spain to clean the floor. For three months, I cleaned the floor.

'It was difficult because I normally give the orders, but there I had to take them. When you're 23, people give you trouble and it makes you stronger, but now it's my turn to dish it out. I'm not 23 years old any more. I've been an executive chef for five years. Sometimes they would treat me like I didn't know anything; I'd be peeling an orange and Albert would want to show me how to do it. I'd say, 'I know how to peel an orange, okay?' '

One day, Bonelli had had enough. 'I stopped and said, 'If you want me to work for another three months you have to say please and thank you'. After this, it was better; he understood I'm not a child. In the end, my boss Albert, said to me, 'You are the best of all the people who have come here this year'.'

The closest most Hongkongers will get to sampling Adria's culinary influences is the 10-course tasting menu Bonelli has created for Kee. But Adria has such a strong impact on cuisine in Spain that Bonelli says his style is becoming the standard. 'It scared me. If you go to a two-star Michelin restaurant in Spain, it's very good, but you have the foam and the gelatine [jelly] - it's the same stuff. Everybody copies Adria.

'Some change it a little and it becomes special, but in Spain it's 90 per cent the El Bulli way. You have clones of Adria everywhere; the chefs don't have the character to say, 'Thank you Ferran, I learned, I opened another door, but with this knowledge I make it my way.' This is important. This is what I will do. I learn, I keep it for me. It's important to learn something new, especially for a chef. Food is always changing, but I want the Bonelli way.'

And the Bonelli way, he says, is to be creative but always with respect for the ingredients. 'At El Bulli, it's style - it's deconstruction - breaking it up and putting it back together again. I respect the style, it's fantastic, but sometimes it's too much deconstruction; if you have the best, why break it up to put it together again?'

It took Bonelli time to appreciate what he was learning. 'It was totally confusing. I didn't like it. It was a cultural difference, but I wanted to understand. My point of going there wasn't to copy - I want to learn. I wanted to know why this guy is so good, why he can make crazy things and no one complains. One day I talked with Ferran and said, 'Chef, I don't understand many things. I want to understand.' And he said to me, 'If you leave El Bulli and you don't understand anything, then you understand El Bulli. There's nothing to understand, El Bulli is El Bulli.' '

Bonelli started his culinary career at the age of 10, working at his father's butcher shop in his hometown of Calavese in Italy. After attending school for professional chefs he went on to work in Australia, the United States, England and Italy, including stints at several Michelin-starred restaurants. He was executive chef of the Mistral restaurant in the InterContinental Grand Stanford in Tsim Sha Tsui, and a year ago, took up the same position at the Kee Club.

The three months at El Bulli were well spent - on completion Bonelli received two offers to work in Japan and Adria himself offered a full-time position, which he declined. 'I said I will stay if you give me one position - the creative chef. Ferran thinks of something and the guy tries to make it and gives it to Ferran to taste. If that position came up then maybe I would take it, but not now.'

Bonelli doesn't plan on making a career of cooking in the El Bulli style, but what he learned will not go to waste. 'Everywhere I go I learn something, but when you put it all together it's mine. I have my style, I want to do it my way. The knowledge I have gathered throughout the world makes me a better chef.

'Before El Bulli, I could look at a carrot and know 100 different ways to cook it. Normal people know maybe 10. Now I look at a carrot and see 1,000 ways to cook it. I want one day for people to say, 'Bonelli - he's a very good chef.' I don't want to be number one. I want to be Bonelli, a very good chef.'