If you’re like me, noshing on tea shrimp with caviar anemones, blossom with its nectar and oilwater osmanthus blossom sounds about as appetizing as dining on sauteed worms, grass and dirt from the backyard. So you might assume the new documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, which chronicles the creation of such avant-garde dishes, would go down as rough as bone marrow tartar. Not so fast.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, opening Dec. 16 in Atlanta, follows a year in the life of the renowned Spanish restaurant El Bulli, beginning with its annual six-month closing. During this time, painstaking research and experimentation is conducted to create the dishes that acclaimed chef Ferran Adria will select to make up the menu when the restaurant re-opens.
We watch as Adria’s team of crackerjack chefs mixes science and art in their Barcelona cooking laboratory, literally squeezing new flavors out of familiar foods by subjecting them to boiling, roasting, frying, steaming, vaccuumizing, freeze-drying and more, then combining them with other foods to try to find unique combinations that will deliver a surprising eating experience—new textures, tastes and visual presentations. And after all that, they have to see if it passes muster with Adria’s demanding palate.
From there it’s back to the actual restaurant in Cala Monjoi, where director Gereon Wetzel guides us through the final frantic staff training and menu tweaks before the big opening. Ferran’s right-hand-man Oriol Castro puts the challenge into perspective: With each patron being served more than 30 dishes, a delay of two minute per dish would extend the overall dining experience by more than an hour.
One of the most interesting aspects of El Bulli is watching the arduous process the chefs go through to come up with their unusual dishes. Although the film’s focus is on all things food, it’s also an exploration of the general creative process, exploring the challenges of innovating and highlighting the “happy accidents” that can occur when you nurture an atmosphere in which experimentation is encouraged.
Wetzel wisely zeroes in on the more common ingredients the chefs work with, which makes the action more accessible and the creations even more impressive. It’s fascinating to watch the chefs try to pull new flavors out of sweet potatoes, mushrooms and even water. And working with these ingredients feels like less of stunt than trotting out rabbit brain.
El Bulli is certainly a feast for the senses, but its biggest drawback is its lack of heart. It feels as sterile as a laboratory, with little insight into what drives Adria to search for his increasingly offbeat food combinations. Likewise, his talented head chefs seem like they would have fascinating back stories, but their portrayals are as paper thin as one of El Bulli’s parmesan crystals. A quick snippet of Oriol sitting outside the restaurant talking about how exhausted he is makes you yearn for more humanity, less food.
Stylistically, the film is relatively straightforward, with few of the avant-garde flourishings that inform the El Bulli experience—though the collection of vivid food photography and music at film’s end does cast a spell.
For the most part, El Bulli entertains as a fly-on-the-wall look at the inner workings of one of the world’s most notorious restaurants. Though it falters on a human level, it succeeds in providing a deeper understanding of what Adria is striving for with his exotic culinary dishes: to give the patron an experience that tickles not just the taste buds but offers surprises for all the senses.
Grade: B
"El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" opens in Atlanta on Dec. 16 at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema.
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