Now we can see Willy Wonka at work. His name is Ferran Adriá, owner of the now-closed El Bulli, and his ideas and his mind are the center of the documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. No narrator needed. Just cameras as El Bulli closes in October 2008 to take six months to think up new ideas and bring them to fruition, even though the creations aren’t actual until the restaurant opens again in 2009, and the menu changes all the time that the restaurant is open. By the time their season ends once again, they will have gone through 200 dishes to serve diners a three-hour experience made up of 35 dishes.
This is not your typical food. You won’t find panini sandwiches, plates of fettucine alfredo, or desserts featuring Bartlet pears. You can find a pumpkin meringue sandwich with almonds and summer truffle, as well as a ham-ginger canapé, parmesan crystal, gorgonzola globe, a “needle tree” which is pine sprout, an ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive, vanishing ravioli (you’ve got to see how this works!), a frozen rose, and a minted ice lake. If you’ve read about Adriá before, or heard about him some other way, you might know him as the chef that used foam for his dishes, foams of different flavors made from actual foods. That’s the wrong emphasis on Adriá, considering his vast imagination. He wants to know what can be made different, how the essence of a food can come forth in a completely different form. And in his laboratory, with chefs including Oriol Castro, his head chef, he toils. He tastes. He advises. He knows that this needs more, this needs less, this needs to be something completely different.
It doesn’t look like Adriá does much cooking, but he does. His imagination is always at full speed, and he’s blessed with chefs who share the same vision, who want these dishes to be so memorable to diners that they will not see elements of these dishes in the same way again once they return to their lives. Because when you come to El Bulli, you leave your daily life completely behind, much like the kids and parents and Charlie and Grandpa Joe left theirs behind to tour Willy Wonka’s factory. Being that El Bulli closed at the end of July 2011, this is the only way you will see it, and then only do you get brief glimpses of the dining room. No cameras should invade that space for the sake of a documentary. Each journey is unique for each diner. They have different tastes, and different expectations, and they know what they’re in for by reputation of El Bulli, which only takes reservations for the new year that January, but they won’t know how they truly feel about it until they taste what’s placed in front of them, what they’re required to eat with tweezers and other utensils, perhaps even their hands in rare cases. Adriá believes that the courses should be an emotional experience. Diners should eat with their emotions, and no doubt there are plenty who have been surprised by what has been presented to them.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is occasionally a slog, too much time spent in the laboratory, too much time spent in the kitchen. But considering that El Bulli is no more, every single moment is necessary. It is a symposium on creativity, showing that creativity takes time to develop and is a lot of work. It doesn’t just appear like Willy Wonka’s gum that’s actually a three-course dinner. At the beginning, we see one chef juicing a sweet potato, trying to extract a liquid from it that tastes exactly like a sweet potato. Mushrooms are vacuumized with various liquids to try to come up with a certain kind of mushroom juice that’s workable. Discussions are constant, papers organized, and the only major drama in the laboratory is when Adriá is ticked off that one of the chefs doesn’t have necessary papers on a computer, complaining of too much paper, which is true because while creating all this, papers can’t be referenced all the time. It’s best to be able to scroll through it on a computer, to make changes right away.
The only special feature on this DVD is an interview with chef George Mendes, filmed after a screening at Film Forum in New York City, and what looks like the lobby. Mendes discusses his experiences working at El Bulli, describes the mind of Adriá, and talks up his latest venture. Mendes’ voice carries awe about working for Adriá, but not in a quavering voice. His is a solid respect, admiration, feeding more information to an interested audience.
There is only one way to end this review. Not waxing excitedly about the photos of dishes shot for the catalog or the obvious hard work by the chefs and waitstaff. Not the final 10 minutes or so in which we simply see Adriá sitting at a table while his kitchen bustles with activity to serve diners, and dishes are served to him to see what he thinks and if anything should be added or subtracted. Just quotes taken from Adriá’s discussions with his chefs in the laboratory and in the restaurant. Though these apply to El Bulli, they’re also what writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and other creative minds think about:
“At the moment, what matters is whether something is magical, and whether it opens up a new path.”
“Surprise, emotion and a new texture.”
“We must set a very complex system in motion.”
“Creativity and production are two different things.”
