Official movie synopsis: For six months of the year, renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adrià closes his restaurant El Bulli — repeatedly voted the world's best — and works with his culinary team to prepare the menu for the next season. An elegant, detailed study of food as avant-garde art, EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS is a rare inside look at some of the world's most innovative and exciting cooking; as Adrià himself puts it, "the more bewilderment, the better!"
Ceci n'est pas un pomme ("this is not an apple") - says a famous painting of an apple by surrealist artist René Magritte. It was part of a fantastic collection that challenged perceptions of reality, images, words and meaning (it wasn't an apple, it was a painting of one...you can look but cannot taste - but wait, what is our definition of apple anyway?).
The same could be said of El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a documentary whose ostensible purpose was to provide a rare look at the work (food as avant-garde art) of founding father of molecular gastronomy, Chef Ferran Adrià, for the world renowned three-Michelin-starred restaurant perched in a remote seaside villa outside Barcelona. It purports to be about the extraordinary food and creative process, but of course/alas, it cannot provide a fulfilling re-creation / satisfying simulation of it. Unlike the ingenious subject of its study (Ferran Adrià), the "this is not a food porn" movie was, to most people in the audience at our screening, frustratingly underwhelming - and not for the expected reason that the movie was showing us fantastic food that is unattainable to most.
For years El Bulli mesmerized media and food lovers alike with its 30-course meals full of spectacular surprises, with dishes the culinary world had never seen, and fielded two million reservations requests per year, until it closed its doors this past summer. I wanted to see the movie to
