El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

Movie Review

Where playing with your food makes you famous

August 24, 2011|By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

From left: Eugenio de Diego, Oriol Castro, and Ferran Adri in El Bulli: Cooking… (Alive Mind Cinema )

***

EL BULLI: Cooking in Progress

Directed by: Gereon Wetzel

At: Museum of Fine Arts

Running time: 109 minutes

Unrated (food, clinical food)

Just so it’s clear who the stars are in Gereon Wetzel’s documentary “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress,’’ the film ends with close-ups of food. Tangerines in oil and little nuggets of ice. Pine nut cream with gin. Bone marrow tartar with oysters. Water, oil, and salt (with an infusion of happenstance). Pumpkin meringue on a tiny roll. This is food as deeply photogenic as Elizabeth Taylor or Halle Berry. It can be prepared with xanthan gum, algin, colorants, and emulsifiers. It can be vacuum-sealed or concocted in a cotton candy machine. And as of the end of July we can no longer have any of it - not the El Bulli way. Not that that was ever easy to experience in the first place.

The restaurant is a house of haute architecture nestled among the rocks and stones of the Spanish coastal town of Roses. It typically feeds about 8,000 people during the six months it’s operating. But in some years, as many as 2 million people have tried to get in. The restaurant began in the early 1960s. Its current chef, the Catalan Ferran Adrià, arrived in the 1980s, won the restaurant two of its three Michelin stars, then won himself a kind of international pop-intellectual fame akin to that of Steve Jobs or Frank Gehry. Adrià helped change the world’s understanding of how else food could taste.

In July, the restaurant closed. In 2014, Adrià will reopen it as the gastronomical think tank that Wetzel’s movie already believes it to be. The movie, which opens tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts, shows that Adrià conceives his menus the way some fashion designers build collections: from a single idea. We catch him in what he calls his year of water.

Wetzel and his crew watch with absurd patience as Adrià’s staff perform experiments in a Barcelona laboratory, then take those experiments south to the restaurant. They chart, diagram, post, and photograph their work. Adrià arrives in chef’s whites to deliver verdicts. We can see science at work. But it’s vague, since we can’t know every additive and gadget. We also can’t know how any of the trials taste. It’s a lot of process for us, yet not too much for us to process.