After el bulli, spain looks forward

EL BULLI, currently the most influential restaurant in the world, will serve its last dinner on July 30. The next morning, Spain’s chefs will wake up to a radically changed universe.

Picture an armada without a flagship, a solar system without a sun, and that is what high-end Spanish cuisine will look like in the absence of El Bulli. In a single generation, it helped transform Spain from a culinary backwater to a world leader, and Ferran Adrià’s cocina de vanguardia (the term he and other chefs prefer to “molecular gastronomy”) became a global obsession among young chefs.

Food as performance art, transformed through wizardry and wit, is now seen as the signature style of modern Spanish restaurants. As Antoní Gaudí transformed the country’s architecture and Pedro Almodóvar its cinema, Mr. Adrià redefined its cuisine. Although many chefs contributed to Spain’s gastronomic revolution, especially Juan Mari Arzak, Santi Santamaría and Andoni Luis Aduriz, it was the sustained daring and smart marketing of Mr. Adrià himself that kept the bar rising.

“It is impossible to say too much about his influence,” said Carme Ruscalleda, a chef in Catalonia who has six Michelin stars to her name, more than any other woman in the world. (She spoke in Catalan; some interviews were conducted through an interpreter.) “He was the first one to tell the chefs of Spain we could think for ourselves.” 

Source: NYTimes.com