'El Bulli' goes to Hollywood

Mix fact with fiction

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El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant crowned the best in the world five times, will be the subject of a big budget Hollywood film about apprentice chefs battling for a job.

Ferran Adria, the world's most celebrated chef famed for pioneering molecular gastronomy announced that he is to sign a deal with a Hollywood producer with a reported budget of $40 million (£24 million).

Announcing the project in Barcelona on Tuesday, Adria said the film would "mix fact with fiction" and use actors alongside real chefs on location in the kitchen of the Costa Brava restaurant.

"It will be something between The Social Network and Ratatouille", said the 48-year-old Catalan chef referring to the story of Mark Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook, which won three Oscars, and the cartoon about a rat working as a chef in a Paris restaurant.

Still in the early stages of development the film will focus on the lives of trainee chefs who work alongside Adria in the kitchens of El Bulli creating such dishes as olive oil caviar, pine cone mousse, and Parmesan snow.

Each year some 3,000 young hopefuls from around the world compete for just 32 places as stagiares, or apprentices to Adria in the kitchen of the exclusive restaurant in the coastal resort of Roses, 100 miles north of Barcelona.

The film will be based on a new book, The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season at El Bulli by Lisa Abend, published in the UK last month.

The author spent the 2010 season with the apprentices who for six months work 14 hour shifts for no pay and only one meal a day just for the privilege of Adria's tutelage.

It is, she says, "kitchen slavery" but would make a great "sort of boot camp film, with a love-story thrown in".

The first task the trainees are given is to scrub the individual stones that form the path from the car park to the door of the restaurant.

"They have to get down on their knees and clean the pebbles one by one before replacing them exactly as they were," she recounts.

"It's a premonition of the tediousness of the rituals that will come. On an average day they spend seven hours (of a 14 hour shift) standing virtually unmoving squeezing the germ from thousands of kernels of corn or trimming the slime off anemones."

But despite the disillusionment the trainees inevitably experience, it's worth it.

"If they make it through the six months, they can say they have worked in the best restaurant in the world," said Miss Abend.

"Ferran sees the film as being the real story of the work that goes on behind the scenes but with fictionalised characters," she said.

The restaurant will close this July and reopen in 2014 as the "El Bulli Foundation", a research academy dedicated to pioneering molecular gastronomy to even greater heights.

Filming could start as early as the end of this year.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk