Rumors and hyperbole always swirled around El Bulli, the fabled restaurant near Barcelona, as thickly and incessantly as foodies buzzed around its culinary ring-leader, Ferran Adria. Stories about Adria's fantastical offerings were traded among the culinary jet-set and the kind of gastronomic adventurers who photograph what they're eating for their blogs, with rapt and lavish descriptions of things like trout egg tempura, tagliatelli of shaved foie gras, something called popcorn clouds, and all that liquid nitrogen. His team of chefs were lauded for their experimental approach to food, which deconstructed ingredients and then remixed them into fantastic new creations, much a DJ might whip up a thrilling new composition out of old clips and samples.
Gereon Wetzel's serene, respectful documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress functions as a kind of pre-made elegy for the restaurant, which will be closing for two years after the 2011 season, possibly permanently. There are reports that Adria is tired of all the press and the crushing demand for reservations (reportedly up to a million requests a year for a restaurant that seats 50 and is only open half the year). In that sense, Wetzel certainly succeeds in his fly-on-the-wall way, allowing the process and process to speak for itself as much as is possible in a medium where a couple useful faculties (taste, smell) aren't available. The film is also helpful in dispelling some of the more baroque hyperbole that has accreted to Adria's methods and creations by ever-more grandiloquent magazine writers. Instead of pulling some wide-eyed enthusiasts to opine about the "high priest of molecular gastronomy" or some such, the film democratizes Adria's work by showing just how much of it is done by other people.
From January to June of each year, El Bulli closes so that Adria and his top echelon of chefs can repair to a kitchen-cum-laboratory in Barcelona and start whipping up ideas. It's a quiet and spotless space, though still very recognizably a kitchen, dispelling the notion that Adria, et al. wear white lab coats while consulting the periodic table. The process seems to take place mostly without the great chef. His cohorts riff and jazz on ingredients, figuring out whether they can get a usable juice out of a sweet potato or maybe just make pasta from it. "At the moment, the taste doesn't matter to us," one says, "that comes later."
Everything is photographed, tabulated, and logged into a computer for referencing when they start concocting that year's menu. For all Adria's talk about the emotion of his creations, the work seems deadly serious. He cruises into the laboratory from time to time like a film director, telling his men to go one direction or the other (occasionally reminding them, "We've already done that"), but mostly talking on his phone. Without voiceover or talking heads, it's quiet and precise, the geometry of plates and knifework witnessed both up close and at a remove - perhaps too much so. By the time they're ready to move everything back to the restaurant, it's difficult to see what has been accomplished.
El Bulli itself is not what you would expect for such an haute-cuisine destination, located as it is in a cozy, sprawling, homey complex on the Costra Brava shore north of Barcelona. As the new staff is welcomed into the surprisingly roomy kitchen, Adria becomes even more the director, conducting the impossibly complex logistics of a restaurant that serves 35 dishes over the course of three to four hours. He also becomes increasingly involved in the food, improvising his way through a menu that he muses somewhat self-deprecatingly is very water-based.
Wetzel gets in tight and close on Adria's dishes but resists turning the film into some food-porn banquet (though the film certainly assumes that its audience will be mostly Adria-informed foodies and so skips a lot of basic information about the process). There's a relaxed quietude to many of these scenes, a refusal to submit to the kitchen-drama theatrics of cable television gastronomic voyeurism - but also perhaps too much time spent watching Adria, a naturally expressionless type, chew and sip thoughtfully at little bits of this and that. A little more direct interaction might have made this into something more of a story and less an interesting curiosity.
Only at the very end do viewers see the entire menu laid out as series of beautiful compositions: there's baroque jellies, pine water with gin, triangular meltaway raviolis, peach algae, pumpkin meringue sandwiches. It's food as origami, the kind of thing that causes one chef to shout out in the kitchen something that has likely never been uttered in a restaurant before: "Less parmesan, more coffee."
Gereon Wetzel's serene, respectful documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress functions as a kind of pre-made elegy for the restaurant, which will be closing for two years after the 2011 season, possibly permanently. There are reports that Adria is tired of all the press and the crushing demand for reservations (reportedly up to a million requests a year for a restaurant that seats 50 and is only open half the year). In that sense, Wetzel certainly succeeds in his fly-on-the-wall way, allowing the process and process to speak for itself as much as is possible in a medium where a couple useful faculties (taste, smell) aren't available. The film is also helpful in dispelling some of the more baroque hyperbole that has accreted to Adria's methods and creations by ever-more grandiloquent magazine writers. Instead of pulling some wide-eyed enthusiasts to opine about the "high priest of molecular gastronomy" or some such, the film democratizes Adria's work by showing just how much of it is done by other people.
From January to June of each year, El Bulli closes so that Adria and his top echelon of chefs can repair to a kitchen-cum-laboratory in Barcelona and start whipping up ideas. It's a quiet and spotless space, though still very recognizably a kitchen, dispelling the notion that Adria, et al. wear white lab coats while consulting the periodic table. The process seems to take place mostly without the great chef. His cohorts riff and jazz on ingredients, figuring out whether they can get a usable juice out of a sweet potato or maybe just make pasta from it. "At the moment, the taste doesn't matter to us," one says, "that comes later."
Everything is photographed, tabulated, and logged into a computer for referencing when they start concocting that year's menu. For all Adria's talk about the emotion of his creations, the work seems deadly serious. He cruises into the laboratory from time to time like a film director, telling his men to go one direction or the other (occasionally reminding them, "We've already done that"), but mostly talking on his phone. Without voiceover or talking heads, it's quiet and precise, the geometry of plates and knifework witnessed both up close and at a remove - perhaps too much so. By the time they're ready to move everything back to the restaurant, it's difficult to see what has been accomplished.
El Bulli itself is not what you would expect for such an haute-cuisine destination, located as it is in a cozy, sprawling, homey complex on the Costra Brava shore north of Barcelona. As the new staff is welcomed into the surprisingly roomy kitchen, Adria becomes even more the director, conducting the impossibly complex logistics of a restaurant that serves 35 dishes over the course of three to four hours. He also becomes increasingly involved in the food, improvising his way through a menu that he muses somewhat self-deprecatingly is very water-based.
Wetzel gets in tight and close on Adria's dishes but resists turning the film into some food-porn banquet (though the film certainly assumes that its audience will be mostly Adria-informed foodies and so skips a lot of basic information about the process). There's a relaxed quietude to many of these scenes, a refusal to submit to the kitchen-drama theatrics of cable television gastronomic voyeurism - but also perhaps too much time spent watching Adria, a naturally expressionless type, chew and sip thoughtfully at little bits of this and that. A little more direct interaction might have made this into something more of a story and less an interesting curiosity.
Only at the very end do viewers see the entire menu laid out as series of beautiful compositions: there's baroque jellies, pine water with gin, triangular meltaway raviolis, peach algae, pumpkin meringue sandwiches. It's food as origami, the kind of thing that causes one chef to shout out in the kitchen something that has likely never been uttered in a restaurant before: "Less parmesan, more coffee."
