The 3-Micheli
n Stars restaurant, and the number one restaurant in the world for five consecutive years, El Bulli, in Roses, Spain, served its final meals to selected guests last July 30, 2011.
El Bulli Restaurant is by appointment only. It takes several months, in some cases over five years to book a dinner at the 50 seats capacity restaurant. There are two million people wanting to book a meal in a year.
A typical dinner will cost one person about Euro 270 or $388 per head, excluding tips
The multi awarded restaurant will be converted into a cuisine foundation that will open in 2014. The restaurant is the breeding ground of many top chefs in the world, among them are current world No. 1 Rene Redzepi of Denmark and Chicago’s Grant Achatz.
Four of the world’s current top five were apprentices of El Bulli.
“For me the spirit of this place has always been its freedom,” said Redzepi, adding that “the courage and bravery” with which they work in his Noma restaurant “came from here. It was like finding a treasure.”
The hotel’s executive chef Ferran Adria is the genius behind the trend setting cooking at El Bulli who was at the helm for more than 24 years.
After a final dinner and drinks party for faithful clients and staff families, Adria will close down the restaurant and begin turning it into a top level cuisine foundation he hopes to open in 2014.
“People think I should be sad but I feel the happiest man in the world,” said Adria. “El Bulli is not closing. It’s just transforming.”
El Bulli’s location in a beautiful and isolated seaside cove on Spain’s far northeastern tip inspired Adria, who started off as a hotel dishwasher, to think about the essence of what makes food taste delicious, prompting him to deconstruct ingredients to what he calls the molecular level.
He would then reconstruct each dish using unexpected re-combinations of the original components, presenting them in mouthful-sized portions. Most required instructions on how to eat them, sometimes with bare hands.
Food took on unexpected shapes, textures and temperatures as the chef used liquid nitrogen to produce vegetable or fruit foam, airy, ethereal reincarnations of solid food, combining seaweed and tea, or caviar with jellied apples.
At the final news conference, Adria was presented with a giant-sized white nougat sculpture of a bulldog, in memory of the “bulli” — a local Catalan word — that inspired a name that is now legendary in the culinary firmament.
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