El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

An elegant study of food as avant-garde art

Presentations - Restaurants

From the inception of new recipes, through experimentation and creation, El Bulli: Cooking In Progress gives audiences the chance to experience the process behind the wide tapestry of cuisine developed each year at El Bulli by master chef Ferran Adria.

El Bulli has been called the best restaurant in the world and Ferran Adria, its creator, deemed a brilliant innovator, the father of molecular gastronomy, or sometimes just a crazy chef.

The restaurant, located outside of Barcelona, closes each year for 6 months, as Adria and staff sequester themselves to concentrate on creating the new culinary wonders that will become their next 30-course menu. This is cooking as avant-garde art: a cocktail composed of hazelnut oil, salt, and water or a dessert of freezedried peppermint and ice shavings.

Surrounded by bizarre hi-tech equipment, elaborate containers, chopping blocks and knives, they experiment with making mushroom juice and sweet potato meringue. Gereon Wetzel’s elegant, observational documentary captures the razor-sharp, science-fiction sensibility at work. An elegant, detailed study of food as avant-garde art, EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS is a rare inside look at some of the world's most innovative and exciting cooking; as Adria exclaims: "The more bewilderment, the better."

At one point in this minutely attentive study of the fabled restaurant of the title, three of the chefs are at the market and ask the fishmonger for a single fish tongue. At another stand they want five grapes and three green beans: that's all they need for the complicated process of kitchen chemistry they have in mind.

If you're the kind of person who wonders why they don't buy 500g of beans and, you know, eat them (well, all but three) for their dinner, you may see some point in the activity the film documents - and, for that matter, the film itself.

ABOUT THE RESTAURANT

Revolutionary Spanish eatery El Bulli is a Michelin three-star restaurant in Roses, Spain (two hours northeast of Barcelona); each night, it serves a tasting menu of 30+ courses, prepared by over 40 chefs, to a single seating of up to 50 guests. For the current season, its last before transforming into a culinary academy, over two million requests were received for the 8,000 available seats.

Head chef Ferran Adria, who took over the restaurant in 1987 and instituted the tradition of yearly developmental sabbaticals, has become the leading inspiration for avant-garde cuisine worldwide, alternately referred to as a mad scientist or "Salvador Dali of the kitchen".