El Bulli chef branches out into the art world

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By Tim Castle
LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Reservations are so tight at the world`s best restaurant that even head chef Ferran Adria is unable to get a booking for friends at short notice.
Only open for half the year, Spain`s El Bulli restaurant on the Barcelona coast is fully booked for months in advance, even at the 300 euros ($415) per person cost of its 30-40 course menu.
Adria says that even if a Nobel Peace Prize winner called for a table he could only make room in the 50-head establishment if there was a cancellation. And those are few and far between.
"If you had a booking and you couldn`t come, what would you do?" Adria, 46, told Reuters in an interview.
"You would ring a friend of yours and you would say, `I have a booking at El Bulli`. So this is what happens, we have no cancellations."
Voted best restaurant in the world four times in a row by Restaurant Magazine, El Bulli serves its guests a stream of micro-sized dishes, each exquisitely presented and the result of months of culinary experimentation. Some call it molecular gastronomy.
Adria and his team of 70 staff use tools such as liquid nitrogen, centrifuges and precision scales to create hot jellies, grilled fruit and novelties such as melon caviar.
The dishes are designed to entertain as much as to nourish, while some are deliberately provocative.
An innocent-looking wafer called "Electric Milk," made from the flower of a Sichuan pepper, delivers a numbing shock to the tongue akin to licking the two poles of a battery.
"Never in your life have you had that sensation in your palate," said Adria.
A new book recording the experiences of diners at El Bulli reveals that some found the provocation too much.
In "Food for Thought, Thought for Food," American journalist Bill Buford said his wife had almost walked out after the unexpected blast delivered by the Sichuan dish.
"That thing had just incinerated her tongue," he told a round table discussion of critics who had been invited to eat at El Bulli.
The book details how El Bulli became for 100 days in 2007 an official outpost of the international art festival "documenta" held every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Each day two people were chosen at random from the exhibition halls and flown to El Bulli for their evening meal.  Continued...
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