Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  I’d come a long way for dinner. But my intentions were pure. Aside from the growing hype about Ferran Adrià—when asked, five of the world’s greatest chefs had picked him as the greatest of all—I’d heard that his food could accomplish one simple thing: It could make you happy. So how far was too far to travel for that? And, I wondered, what in the world does happiness taste like?

  I entered El Bulli and sat. No silverware on the table, no menu. I didn’t ask for a thing, nor was I asked if I wanted anything. A welcome drink suddenly appeared, brimming in a small martini glass, a pomegranate-colored liquid that was announced as a whiskey sour, though who knew what it was. Around me were others like me, bound by hunger, expectant. Everyone had traveled some distance to be here; everyone was about to travel farther. I saw dishes jet by but couldn’t name a single one of them. There were white spoons filled with a green jelly and topped with what seemed to be caviar, there were foams of green and yellow and pink, and there was a plate that, by my best estimation, was covered with orange worms.

  The warm sea lapped just beyond the patio, and a kind of reverent hush was disturbed by the occasional tinkling of silverware and wineglasses. I noticed a woman sitting at a nearby table. She had put something into her mouth, and now her whole body shook slightly, as if she was having a fit of hiccups. She sat with her head bowed, her shoulders moving up and down, until she looked up at the man she was with. She had tears in her eyes, and when she met his gaze, she started laughing—unafraid laughter that made him laugh, too.

  I noticed another man who I’d later learn was an American molecular biologist and a devotee of El Bulli for years, who considered Ferran Adrià a prophet. With each new course, he stood up and somewhat awkwardly switched seats, claiming later that the only way the meal made sense to him was by changing his spatial relationship to the food.

  Was this madness or heaven? What kind of food makes people weep or sets them moving around a table like the hands of a clock?

  When my first plate arrived, I was a bit frightened. I’d never been to a restaurant where a chef completely decides what you’re going to eat and drink. At El Bulli, choices were left to Ferran Adrià, el jefe máximo, and the food was delivered in bits and combinations that didn’t look like food at all, accompanied by instructions from the waiter: “This is a childhood memory. Take in one bite.” Or: “This is trout-egg tempura. Two bites, quickly.”

  It came down to a question of faith. And I suddenly felt the presence of this man, Ferran Adrià, somewhere in the shadows, holding the fork in my hand, guiding it to the plate, impaling a mound of caramel-covered, sweet-smelling tenderness that had been introduced as “rabbit apple,” and lifting it to my mouth, which, despite my misgivings, had been watering in anticipation of this very moment and watered still, now that the moment was here.

  2. [ON HUNGER]

  To discover what happiness tastes like, I’d persuaded my wife, Sara, to join me in Spain with our baby boy and a couple of friends, Melissa and her husband, Carlos, who would help translate. In the months leading up to the trip, Sara and I had lived in the first flush and ridiculous urgency of new parenthood. We’d passed each other in the middle of the night, as if underwater, handing off Baby. We’d changed Baby’s diaper twenty times a day. We’d gauged every second of our ticking lives by the general well-being of Baby, by every hilarious burp and pleasing snore. I can’t say I’d tasted a thing I ate during that time, nor do I remember a single dream, as meals and sleep came in desperate spasms. So we’d arrived slightly zombified, our former lives figments of our former imaginations.

  It was August, high season on the Costa Brava, and we stayed in the last two rooms available in Roses, at a German-run hotel, rooms that might have made a good alternate setting for the next celebrity sex video du jour—shiny pillows and mirrors everywhere, and a shower with glass sides that could be viewed from the bed. Out on the beach in front of the hotel was a whole galaxy of overripe, topless bathers and lingam-hugging Speedos that made us feel that much more pale and alien.

  The arrangement was simple: Carlos, who was the portrait of gallego smooth in a goatee and ponytail, would join me, who was Spanishless, each day with Ferran, who was Englishless, in hopes that we would make it back to toast the sunset with wine and cheese and our wives.

  One twilight early on, while we sat drinking red wine on the balcony off our room as the sun skittered across the Mediterranean in goldfish-orange to the horizon, a man in the adjoining room came out on his balcony, too, in white briefs and a tank top, with his own bottle of wine, just to breathe the warm air. He told us he’d driven sixteen hours to get here from Italy, that his brother, who owned a restaurant in Naples, was apprenticing at a famous restaurant, and that he and his own family had arrived to taste the delicacies of the great head chef who worked there.

  Of course—El Bulli. The man smiled.

  “You’ve heard of it, too,” he said. “My brother tells me that Ferran Adrià does the impossible.”

  “And your brother likes working in the kitchen?” I asked.

  “He’s exhausted,” the man said. “Fifteen-hour days, seven days a week. If it weren’t for Ferran Adrià, he’d probably go home right now. But in twenty, thirty, forty years, they’re going to say Ferran Adrià was the best that ever was, and it’s going to be an honor for my brother to say he chopped his vegetables.”

  He paused and offered us some of his wine, which we accepted. “It’s a good wine,” he said, poking his nose into the goblet and inhaling. “Not so overpowering. It’s a bit of a secret.” He admired the label, then said, “If you’ll excuse me, I’m finally eating there tonight.” Then he disappeared into his room of shiny pillows to prepare for his own trip up the mountain and down the other side to El Bulli.

  We stood with our glasses full of wine, our faces lit a most otherworldly orange, and—we couldn’t help it—we stared at the place where he’d just been standing, our envy framing the void, our hunger filling it.

  3. [ON THE END OF THE WORLD]

  Ferran Adrià often speaks of moments that mark a before and an after. For most, a dozen of these eurekas in a life is a lot. For Ferran, not a day passes that he doesn’t assume he is on the verge of yet another one, that the world he’s made for himself will simply explode under the weight of the new one rising from it.

  His very first before-and-after came in 1985, when he was twenty-three. He was not yet the kind of strange celebrity he’s becoming today, recognized on the street or in restaurants or at parties as a modern Willy Wonka, as the supposed savior or destroyer of cuisine. It was this young and unknown Ferran Adrià who was standing in his kitchen, staring at yet another order for partridge. How many times had he made this dish? Hundreds? Thousands?

  There was nothing haute or nouvelle about the partridge dish. It was a plato típico, a common plate, escabeche de perdiz, made by every chef at every restaurant in Spain. It was simply an obligation to have it on the menu. The finished product looked as if it had been electrocuted at altitude, in midflight, and then had fallen two miles to the plate, battered and charred. But on this one particular evening, Ferran Adrià found himself suddenly incapable, frozen by some internal pause button.

  How to deal with this sad bird? With the sameness of every day, of making every plate again that he’d already made before, by copying, copying, copying the recipes of dead or dying French and Spanish chefs? Wasn’t there something greater, some secret waiting for release in this food? Perhaps Ferran Adrià had no right to see the partridge for what it wasn’t, or for the multiplicity of what it could be, but if eating is as necessary as laughter or a sob, then where was the emotion in having charred partridge delivered to your table?

  So he began to play with the bird. He plucked the wings and pinched some meat from the bones, which gave tenderly between his fingers. He removed the partridge from the partridge, as it were, and peppered the meat and swirled it with vegetables, some asparagus shoots and zucchini and finely shaved carrots, some l
eeks and onions at their most succulent. Then, on a whim, he tossed in some local langosta, lobster. Because it pleased him. And without another thought he sent it out to the dining room. A deconstructed partridge. No, a deconstructed, Mediterrane-anized partridge. Vaya!

  But the greatest surprise came when it wasn’t sent back, as the faceless diner put fork to bird and bird to mouth, participated in the deconstruction, and actually liked it. And with that began the revolution, the alchemy, the culinary miracles. He experimented with gazpacho, vacuuming it into a liquidless, cold dish. When people ordered gazpacho expecting gazpacho, they suddenly did a double take at what appeared before them in a bowl: a sculpture garden of beheaded tomatoes, slivers of cucumber set like juju sticks, peeled whole onions … but where was the soup? And while other chefs certainly improvise from time to time, or as a last resort, Ferran Adrià couldn’t help himself. It was jazz, abstract painting. Dervishly, pathologically, he began changing everything.

  One day he got to thinking about ice cream, why it’s always sweet, why, when confronted with it, your entire body prepares for that great blast of sugar and cool cream—not an unpleasant sensation, especially on the hot Costa Brava, but nonetheless the same sensation triggered by the same food—and so he set out to obliterate the sameness of ice cream. And he did, mixing a batch, cream and milk and ice, but then, at the last moment, substituting salt for sugar. Vaya! What he tasted in his mouth felt like something cool and mineral, as if it had been scooped from the dark side of the moon.

  Now he saw the whole world in his kitchen: the autonomous march of history repeating history, the tyranny of that repetition. Chocolate: Why not add another texture, another taste to the tongue? He made some rich dark chocolate and smeared it with Japan—streaks of green wasabi that suddenly gave it a kick, a delicious burn that transformed the idea of chocolate into chocolate of some higher power. Bread: Why not make it explode? After baking bite-sized spheres of bread, he took a syringe and infiltrated the spongy interior with warm olive oil. He saw a simple croquette and injected it with seawater. People put them in their mouths expecting the expected—a little crunch, some chew, air—and were suddenly dealing with a burst and flood, victual chaos, palatal dyslexia, a tilting universe.

  The new big bang.

  Once, when Ferran Adrià was back in Barcelona for the winter, he bought a truckload of perfectly ripe tomatoes. He had no idea what he was doing. He and his brother, Albert, took the tomatoes back to their workshop, where Ferran dumped them on the floor and impulsively grabbed a bicycle pump. He stuck a tomato with it and furiously began pumping. For a moment, Albert regarded his brother quizzically, and the tomato itself seemed impervious until … it exploded everywhere! Covered in red gook, Ferran fell upon the wreckage, sifting through it, and triumphantly lifted one shard aloft. A fine, pinkish spume bubbled along the line where air had forced a fissure. He tasted it, a tomato without body—earth salt and juice, which suddenly disappeared like sparklers. After that, the brothers spent the afternoon blowing up tomatoes to see what more there was to discover.

  It was air that created this tomato foam, but then how could you make it in the kitchen? You couldn’t very well have someone in a back room blowing up tomatoes with a bicycle pump, could you? And also, the foam bubbled for a moment, but then flattened and quickly vanished. The brothers were stymied. Ferran felt that finding the key to making this foam would be like discovering a new planet.

  After some experimentation with an old whipped-cream canister, and with the addition of the perfect proportion of gelatin, they finally happened upon it: a tomato foam, straight from a metal canister, that could stand on its own! A fine, floating, airy thing that tasted like … like … some new mesospheric formation they called cloud. And the tomato was just the beginning. Soon there were curry and beet clouds, strawberry and apple clouds. Once in your mouth, they bubbled, effervesced, and evaporated, leaving a tingle of taste.

  His foam was soon being copied by nearly every innovative young chef in Paris and Milan and New York, and made Ferran Adrià famous in foodie circles, as much for striking out a new course in cuisine as for the whimsy of how he’d done it. But today at his restaurant, less than five years later, Ferran is almost dismissive of those foams, using them sparingly. “It’s not so conscious,” he told me in his kitchen, the first time we met. “It’s just that we opened a path and now that path is open. We may not serve any foams next year. Most restaurants are museums, but not El Bulli.” I asked him what El Bulli was all about, then. He considered for a moment, then gestured at the white-coated chefs chopping like sped-up metronomes. “El Bulli is crazy,” he said. “It’s the drunkenness of all the new things that can be.”

  4. [APHORISMS FROM THE PROFESSOR]

  “Painting, music, movies, sculpture, theater, everything—we can survive without it,” Ferran said. “You have to eat, or else you die. Food is the only obligatory emotion.”

  “The taste of a lemon is incredible!”

  “There are eight degrees between warm and cold.”

  “You must always eat with two hands.”

  “I prefer to spend my money on a bottle of champagne at the Ritz in Paris than on a pair of shoes. I’ll always remember the champagne. I’ll never remember the shoes.”

  “The tomato is American.”

  “The prawn head is Spanish.”

  “In the end everything already exists; we’re not inventors of anything. But this is the definition of creativity. It’s seeing what other people don’t see.”

  “Laughing brings out the good in food. It’s good to laugh. If you don’t laugh, you’re going to magnify. And if you magnify, you’re going to die.”

  “The important thing is the miniskirt, not what color it is.”

  5. [CONCERNING THE EFFECT OF TOMATO HEARTS ON WEDDED DISCOURSE]

  One afternoon Carlos and I took the long drive into the mountains along the Mediterranean toward El Bulli. Up there everyone vanished, the sky came closer, the sea sparkled. If it was treacherous to drive the hairpins and potholes, it was suddenly much easier to breathe. Later, when I asked Ferran to describe the perfect meal, he stressed that there had to be magic in arrival. That it had to be a place hard to get to or somehow earned. That the journey, more than any appetizer or cocktail, would remind you of your hunger.

  Now it was time to eat. Carlos and I had been invited to have lunch in the kitchen so we could taste and watch at the same time. It felt like an exploratory mission, a warm-up to the main event, which would come a few nights later. We were seated at a wide wooden table with two place settings and a couple of wine goblets full of light. We were asked if we had any allergies (none) and then came the welcome cocktail, what the waiter called a “hot-cold margarita.” When I picked it up, the glass was partly warm and partly cool to the touch, since by some process the drink had been both heated and chilled at once. The margarita was tangy and airy, and the temperature difference, the movement from hot to cold, created a tumbling sensation, a tequila wave with a triple sec undertow, ending on one arctic, sweet note. We were startled into smiles.

  And though whimsy has made Ferran Adrià famous, one soon realizes that a meal at El Bulli is driven by calculation and logic, coordinated through the phalanx of chefs at their various stations. Each guest eats roughly two dozen dishes, and if the diner simply rises to go to the bathroom, she can break an almost sacred rhythm that Ferran feels is crucial to the meal, to the variations in temperature and texture that help give his food its character. “The plate is a song,” he says. “If the harmony is too slow, the person who receives the plate isn’t receiving what the chef intended. There’s a rhythm that’s hard to explain, but it changes everything.” Ferran’s sense of time, then, guides the journey of every morsel from kitchen to mouth, and once it’s there, he wants you to taste it as he does. And that occasionally requires spoken instruction. “The feeling of cold and hot is very different in one bite than in two bites,” he says. “Sometimes, two bites makes all the di
fference.”

  Because much of what’s eaten here seems without context, the meal itself, the rush of these dishes, builds a new context in which tastes emerge with shot-glass intensity from a nebula of cool mists and jellies. The idea is that a new dish will be launched every five minutes, no more than ten seconds after it’s ready, and in those intervals between dishes, a guest will experience both sensual and psychic liftoff, to be repeated five minutes later. In theory, this makes the meal two hours long, though often people will linger a couple of hours longer at the table.

  “We are inviting fifty people into our home every night,” says Ferran. “It should be the greatest event of their lives.”

  The trick, of course, is to translate the ideas of Ferran’s fertile mind into living dishes, up to two hundred different ones in a night. Further, each dish must be prepared en masse, then delivered to the table according to a nearly-impossible-to-achieve Ferran standard. And the fear of not reaching that standard is what drives the dizzying, obsessive pace in the kitchen.

  From our vantage point, it was all just an endless rush of plates passing to and fro. Suddenly, a tray crowded with goodies appeared before us, and another, and another—what Ferran calls first and second and third “snacks,” which are meant to be fun and lighten the mood before the main courses. None were recognizable.

  There was dried quinoa in a paper cone, and, when I tilted it back into my mouth, the quinoa lightly pelted my tongue and echoed in my ears like a fine rain turning crunchy. There were also seaweed nougat (salty and sublime), deep-fried bits of prawn (so light they disintegrated before they could be rightly chewed), and strawberries filled with Campari (every cell cloying, the strawberries more strawberry because of the liqueur). No sooner would one marvel cease, one of us sputtering, What was that?, than the next bit of Martian food would arrive. It all ended in a strange, caramelized cube that I lifted with my thumb and forefinger and gently slid onto my tongue. Only after shattering it between my teeth did the object reveal itself: yogurt bursting from its candied shell in a warm, smooth flood.