Kitchen’s Closed

“So, Ferran Adria has announced that El Bulli – the best restaurant in the world – is set to close for a couple of years, and jaws have dropped wide enough to shove a whole tasting menu in. ‘No meals will be served in El Bulli in 2012 and 2013,’ Adria told the Madrid Fusion gastronomic conference on Tuesday. ‘With a format like the current one it is impossible to keep creating. In 2014, we will serve food somehow. I don’t know if it will be for one guest or 1,000.’ First, some numbers: Adria, 47, serves his €200 [£174] tasting menu to 50 people a night, for just six months of the year at El Bulli, the three Michelin-starred restaurant north of Barcelona, where he has been head chef since 1983. He receives requests from two million people for one of the 8,000 seats available each season. And the rest of the year is devoted to concocting new creations in his laboratory in Barcelona. But Adria has always shunned the ‘molecular gastronomy’ tag, preferring to describe his work, when pressed, as ‘avant garde’ or ‘deconstructivist’.”