For one day last week
For one day last week
For one day last week, the Diamond Ballroom at Hong Kong’s new Ritz-Carlton hotel was turned into a lecture hall. The audience was a small group of media and die-hard foodies, and the speaker was Ferran Adrià, the man behind Spain’s famed El Bulli restaurant and the world’s most influential chef.
He was dressed in a white jacket with gray slacks and black dress shoes, but he wasn’t giving a cooking demonstration. Instead, the 49-year-old Catalan pontificated like a philosophy professor on the existential nature of cuisine.
“When does a tomato taste like a tomato?” Mr. Adria asked. Is it when you cut it and put salt on it? Is tomato sauce natural? He considered several other ingredients the same way too, pondering the hypothetical problem of creating a pastry made of strawberries. “All of cuisine is an elaboration,” he said.
At El Bulli, Mr. Adria was a pioneer of molecular gastronomy ― a term he disdainfully describes as “marketing.” The three-Michelin-star restaurant, which ranked No. 1 on Restaurant Magazine’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants a record five times over the past decade, was legendary for its deconstructionist and experimental cuisine.
Then, in July, at the height of El Bulli’s powers, Mr. Adria closed the eatery where he had first become head chef in the mid-1980s.
Which brings us to Hong Kong. It’s a mark of the celebrity nature of chefs these days that Mr. Adria was touring Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong courtesy of the Spanish tourism board, in the hopes of generating interest among Chinese travelers. It was his second visit to China, and he said he hopes to spend more time there ― studying Chinese cuisine, of course.
“I’m more interested in finding out why dairy products aren’t used in a dish than the dish itself,” he said in an interview. “Why do they [the Chinese] put all the dishes in the middle of the table? Why do they cook vegetables so quickly but fish for so long? Why are there a lot more hot dishes than cold dishes in Chinese cuisine?”
Mr. Adria’s long-term project is a new culinary foundation, which is scheduled to open in 2014 on the site of his former restaurant. It will host a rotating group of 20 chefs who will visit for months at a time. Alongside Mr. Adrià, they will create new dishes and work on different approaches to cooking.
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