The qualifier follows him like a surname: Ferran Adrià, Greatest Chef in the World. No one, not England's Gordon Ramsay nor Michelin supermen Joël Robuchon and Alain Ducasse, can credibly claim to have more influence on the world of haute cuisine today.
ElBulli, Mr. Adrià's restaurant on an isolated beach two hours north of Barcelona, is the fountainhead of a futuristic approach to food that pervades the kitchens of young, ambitious chefs everywhere. Foams, airs, fruit juice "caviars," hot gelatins - all techniques and trompe l'oeil concoctions sprung from the ingenious mind of Mr. Adrià, whom Time declared one of the 100 most influential people of our time. In April, elBulli was voted No. 1 restaurant in the world for the third straight year at the S. Pellegrino World's Best Restaurant Awards.
It's also a pilgrimage site for foodies, who partake of 30 to 35 small courses, often eaten by hand or with specially engineered cutlery and presented unconventionally on spoons or, as in the case of the "caviar," in tin cans. At least, it's a pilgrimage site for the lucky few who manage to score a table. Each year, elBulli gets two million requests for 8,000 reservations.
With the restaurant open just six months of the year, April to October, it amounts to what Mr. Adrià says is a 120-year waiting list. (Should you feel lucky, the reservation line for 2009 opens next Wednesday.)
"People make such a trip, it's a person's gastronomical dream," he says, seated in a hotel armchair in Toronto this week. That pent-up expectation is the reason Mr. Adrià does something most of his wealthier counterparts with TV deals and Las Vegas outposts could not: actually work in the kitchen "99 per cent of the time."
"ElBulli is in a very remote little bay, lost in the world. It would be a lack of respect if Ferran was not there," says the chef, speaking through an interpreter but often making himself understood with the help of expressive hand gestures and facial contortions. (In fine Spanish heterosexual-male fashion, he even blew this reporter a kiss goodbye.)
Mr. Adrià was in Toronto Wednesday to promote A Day at elBulli, his new book. More kitchen diary and photo album than cookbook, and almost as heavy and large as a rump of Iberico ham, it is, he says, a sort of graphic surrogate for 1,992,000 people who each year don't get to slurp raw egg yolks shellacked in caramel or gnaw at a grilled fish carcass wrapped in candy floss that looks like some kind of bizarre aquatic dust bunny.
"Unfortunately, many people will not be able to have dinner at elBulli," says Mr. Adrià, 46. "I felt that we needed to open it up to a wider audience and communicate our ideas."
Taking his manifesto to the broader world through books, public appearances and even chemistry sets for home cooks has become a necessity for Mr. Adrià. ElBulli, whose dishes are dreamed up during the off season in a Barcelona workshop strewn with industrial equipment and books, makes no money. There are 55 cooks for a single seating of 55. Even at an average guest cheque of €300 ($470) a person, including wine, there are ingredients to buy, waiters to pay and centrifuges and cotton candy spinners to upkeep.
If Mr. Adrià is the world's most influential chef, he may also be the most misunderstood, a situation he is constantly attempting to rectify. His embrace of mad-scientist machinery and industrial chemicals to alter textures and appearances has incited the ire of old-school toques. Unconventional flavour combinations, such as cherries dipped in pork fat, are sometimes dismissed as culinary train wrecks.
To this, Mr. Adrià offers the standard retort: Every avant-garde artist - and he insists elBulli is about experience, not nourishment - must endure the wrath of reactionaries. Besides, however you slice it, cooking is chemistry. "When we see the liquid nitrogen, we see the world of science. But we don't realize that it's just a simple gas, which is used in industry to make ice cream," notes Mr. Adrià.
