El Bulli restaurant to become culinary academy
Ferran Adria has released official details about the transformation of El Bulli, his award-winning restaurant in Roses, Spain, into a ‘Foundation of avant-garde gastronomy’.
Operating as a private and not-for-profit Foundation, El Bulli will each year allow 20-25 chefs and front-of-house scholars, who have been chosen through a ‘demanding and thorough’ selection process, to work alongside the restaurant’s creative team.
The restaurant, which has been voted as the S.Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurant for the past four years, will be physically refurbished to cater for the new scholars and include a new audiovisual lounge and library. It will however retain the dining room in its current form, where a certain number of diners will have the chance to taste the Foundation’s creations each year, as of 2014.
Confirming the change of direction, a statement released by the restaurant said the new Foundation would not be a school, rather a ‘think tank’ of gastronomic creativity.
“The El Bulli Foundation will be a Foundation of all avant-garde gastronomy lovers: chefs, sommeliers, front-of-house professionals, gourmets, creative thinkers or solely enthusiasts of our dream,” it read. “(It will be) a breeding ground for new ideas and for new talents to go together, hand in hand, even further.”
El Bulli scholarships
The Foundation, which will also concentrate on other disciplines such as art, design and ‘creative communication’, will publish its findings each year through books, audiovisual productions, the Internet, and at chef conferences and gastronomy schools.
It was at the Madrid Fusion conference in Madrid last month that Adria first announced he was to temporarily close El Bulli in 2011 for two years to analyse its techniques and creative processes. He then revealed in an interview with the New York Times that he was to reopen the restaurant as a culinary academy earlier this month.
El Bulli will also publish a new encyclopaedia of contemporary cuisine, an ‘exhaustive and detailed compendium about creative methods, product studies, new elaborations, techniques, concepts and styles that have stressed the evolution of cuisine in the last decades.’
