“I closed El Bulli with 2 million people demanding bookings. It was awarded the best restaurant in the world five times. I was recognised as the most creative chef in the world. I left at the peak because I had already started to see that I couldn’t keep up the same creative level, so I had to change,” Ferran Adrià explains.
For the majority of us who never got to dine at El Bulli in Spain, the world’s most famous restaurant until it shut in 2011, its legend lives on. Executive head chef Ferran Adrià turned it into a globally famous model of gastronomy, redefining haute cuisine, hordes clamouring for that elusive booking, awards pouring in, its three Michelin stars (awarded in 1997) remaining firmly in place until it closed.
‘Fame, ego, vanity can only be faced with values: with respect, honesty, generosity, gratitude and normality. Otherwise, fame is a very, very hard drug’
And if Ferran Adrià‘s musings might sound arrogant, if entirely accurate, he is actually enormously down to earth – an attentive interviewee, considering our questions carefully and talking at length about his notorious career and future projects.
We are using a translator because the Spaniard doesn’t speak any English, and while reflective of his past as one of the world’s most famous and certainly most successful chefs, is now fully focused on the now, and the work he is undertaking through the El Bulli Foundation, set up to extend its culinary legacy.
“People see me as a chef, and I’m happy to be one, but I’ve been working for the last 14 years in sociology, anthropology, psychology; the last 14 years of my career are very different from those that I spent in the restaurant. But now my project is in education, in the business world, totally different.”
‘I’ve been reflecting for 15 years on what that 22-year-old who entered El Bulli did, because it’s important to understand yourself. It’s a problem when one doesn’t want to see their past. I do because it was incredible’
Moving from one world to the other must have been hard though? “The transition was very difficult, but I don’t complain, I’m privileged. El Bulli and I are privileged. And I’ve been reflecting for 15 years on what that 22-year-old who entered El Bulli did, because it’s important to understand yourself. It’s a problem when one doesn’t want to see their past. I do, because it was incredible, but when the restaurant closed, I knew it was another cycle,” he says.
“Revolutions aren’t planned. At that time, I wouldn’t have thought about what later happened, especially for Spanish cuisine, because it wasn’t very recognised in the haute cuisine world then.
“El Bulli was a whole evolution, and today Spain is the reference for innovation in haute cuisine, this is indisputable. There are important countries, always France, it’s the country from where we learned, but today innovation is in Spain,” he says.
‘El Bulli was a whole evolution, and today Spain is the reference for innovation in haute cuisine, this is indisputable’
Sitting in his offices in Barcelona where the El Bulli Foundation (a centre for culinary activity and gastronomic education) is based, the sage, maestro of a chef may not be running the best restaurant in the world any more, but he’s as busy as ever, his list of projects and accolades since closing El Bulli, extraordinary, all of which he will be discussing at The Sheldonian on Saturday at Oxford’s Literary Festival.
“A lot has been said about El Bulli, but apart from the restaurant we’ve already done almost 200 projects. Just summarising it is very difficult. But we’ve been running the El Bulli Foundation for 14 years now, and they are two totally different worlds.
“It’s not easy to know exactly where you’ll end up; you start and keep going, but after the closure we realised that people were really interested in El Bulli’s legacy,” he says.
‘When people flatter you all day, in the end, it’s very difficult not to believe it. Values are the only antidote to fame’
Let’s try and summarise for him then. He opened the El Bulli Foundation in 2013, the museum following in 2020 on the site of the former restaurant, made a 15 episode documentary ELBULLI: HISTORY OF A DREAM, compiled Bullipedia; a 30 volume gastronomic encyclopedia, to mention but a few of the 200 projects, and is now helping to set up the world’s first gastronomic university in Madrid.
Not a man to rest on his laurels then, as driven now as he ever was. But regardless of what Ferran Adrià‘ achieved, what of the man himself? How did he cope with that level of world-wide notoriety and the stress of maintaining El Bulli’s level of excellence?
‘There are about 200 million chefs in the world. Being number one at a creative level is an insane amount of pressure’
“Fame, ego, vanity can only be faced with values: with respect, honesty, generosity, gratitude, and normality. Otherwise, fame is a very, very hard drug. When people flatter you all day, in the end, it’s very difficult not to believe it. Values are the only antidote to fame,” he says quietly.
We cite fellow molecular gastronomic chef Heston Blumenthal (although Ferran prefers the term deconstructed cuisine) who has been discussing the pressures and toll it took on his own mental health, as an example. “Heston is a good friend, and you have to understand the context. There are about 200 million chefs in the world. Being number one at a creative level is an insane amount of pressure, and everyone faces it as they can.
“Handling all that is not easy, I understand Heston. I don’t have kids, which is very different. With my wife, it’s different. When you have kids, balancing it is not easy. In my case, a problem I could have had, I didn’t have. I knew that to be at the top, in general, but at a creative level even more, the 8-hour workday and weekends don’t exist. I don’t know anyone who has made it very far and doesn’t work a lot of hours. There’s also luck that when you do what you love, it’s not a job.
‘The first challenge is having fun, all my life I’ve tried to have fun. The word happiness is a bit corny, but now, having fun is something we all understand’
“Your mental strength will be essential, but this happens in cooking, in football, in journalism, in any field when you fight to be at the top – for each person it’s different. For example, I’ve more or less had very strong mental strength throughout my career, which has never dropped. I had one with COVID, but that wasn’t a creative problem, we were all crazy, but everyone handles it differently,” he says.
“The first challenge is having fun, all my life I’ve tried to have fun. The word happiness is a bit corny, but now, having fun is something we all understand,” he says.
“But for the last year and a half we’ve been creating a gastronomic university in Madrid. It’s very important and I will talk about it at The Oxford Literary Festival. It wasn’t in the script, I never intended to create a gastronomic university, but it will be called MACC, in collaboration with Comillas University in Madrid, and that takes up a lot of my time.
“But there’s a phrase I always say: ‘Start by questioning what cooking is, then go on to question what innovation is, what business is, and all this starts coming together’.”
‘I don’t know anyone who has made it very far and doesn’t work a lot of hours. There’s also luck that when you do what you love, it’s not a job’
“So we’re already building two new buildings in Madrid, they’re very special; one of those buildings is a gastronomic museum, and inside are the classrooms. If you go to the El Bulli website, you can find more information there. https://elbullifoundation.com/en/
As for his drive, Ferran just shrugs and says: “It’s very hard, very hard, because in the end, almost no creative who has worked has had more than 25 years of high-level creativity. Not even Picasso, who changed the history of painting, but at 50, he wasn’t the same as at 25. So I’m also working on a small book about these elements, like success. They are the same for everyone, the point is how you apply them.”
But regardless of his workload doesn’t he miss being in the kitchen? “I’m in contact with the kitchen, my brother Albert has Enigma, which is one of the most interesting places in the world at a creative level. And I’m in contact with people from El Bulli who have restaurants, and I go to restaurants 250 times a year, so I stay in contact.”
‘Start by questioning what cooking is, then go on to question what innovation is, what business is, and all this starts coming together’
Where does he go? “I prefer going to good places. Yesterday, I was at a 3-star Michelin restaurant, but the next day it could be something simpler — like a place that serves grilled fish, as long as it’s well done.”
We wonder where he’ll find to eat in Oxford? No pressure then!
Ferran Adrià talks to Suzi Feay on Saturday March 29 at 12 noon in The Sheldonian. Book ‘elBulli Today: Preserving the Legacy and Spirit of the World’s Greatest Restaurant’ here https://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events/2025/march-29/elbulli-today-preserving-the-legacy-and-spirit-of-the-worlds-greatest-restaurant
For the third consecutive year, Instituto Cervantes London is a proud collaborator of the OLF’s 30th anniversary, coordinating the Spanish and Latin American Programme.
As part of the programme, Spanish chef, author and entrepreneur, Ferran Adrià will join the inaugural day of the Festival as a Guest Speaker on Saturday 29th at 12:00pm.
Thanks to Gaby Elizalde for translating.
