As esperanza writes, the NYT web registration is free. Unfortunately, the articles usually disappear from the web after a week or so. An excellent piece of journalism and worthy of being preserved in a thread, it’s pasted immediately below.
A Laboratory of Taste By ARTHUR LUBOW
Several months before our defense secretary downgraded France to the ''old Europe'' and our restaurateurs started pouring French wine into the gutters, I was talking with Marc Veyrat, a French chef whose two restaurants have received top scores from the Michelin and Gault-Millau guides. To my surprise, Veyrat told me that the most creative cooks in Europe were no longer French; they were Spanish. Had my source been located in the Pentagon and not in a sumptuous auberge on the shores of Lake Annecy, I would have taken the assertion with several fistfuls of gros sel. However, this declaration of Spanish creative supremacy came from one of the most forward-looking chefs in France. I paid attention.
After a trip to Spain this summer, I'm convinced: the effervescence that buoyed French nouvelle cuisine in the 1970's has somehow been piped across the Pyrenees. Nor am I alone in feeling that way. A cover article in The Wine Spectator in June proclaimed that Spain is ''the new source of Europe's most exciting wine and food.'' Many prominent American chefs agree. ''Spain is where the zeitgeist has shifted,'' says Charlie Trotter, Chicago's most celebrated chef. ''In Spain, they're pushing the envelope.'' David Bouley, who oversees two distinguished restaurants in Lower Manhattan, told me: ''The Spanish don't have this rigor where they have to cook a certain way. They seem to be totally free. Something happened in France -- they ran out of gas. I don't hear about youthful passion as I used to in those kitchens. The real explosion is with all the young guys in Spain.'' Even Thomas Keller of the much-honored French Laundry, north of San Francisco, who has some qualms about new-wave Spanish cuisine, remarks that ''the French work ethic has deteriorated over the last few years'' and that compared with Spain, ''you have in France a much more traditional, fundamental-based cooking.''
You can still eat very well in France, as you did 20 years ago. The problem is that almost everywhere you eat in France, it could still be 20 years ago. Nothing has changed. The French nouvelle cuisine revolutionized the culinary world in the 1970's. Consolidating and advancing, the next generation of chefs maintained France's pre-eminence. But over the last decade, French innovation has congealed into complacency. With the advent of the Internet, as chefs scan the globe for new ideas, France is no longer the place they look. ''Everybody on eGullet wants to know what is happening in Spain,'' says Grant Achatz, the young chef at Trio, a foodie favorite in Evanston, Ill.
The two epicenters of the Spanish groundswell are both in the northern part of the country -- Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, and the Basque country around San Sebastián. And while there are many exciting chefs throughout Spain, the name on everyone's lips, the man who is redefining haute cuisine into alta cocina, is a prodigiously talented, self-taught Catalan. Like Elvis or Miles, he is usually known by his first name alone: Ferran.
Ferran Adrià's restaurant El Bulli in the Catalan seaside town of Rosas, a two-hour drive north of Barcelona, is a gastronome's once-before-you-die mecca. It's not merely the three Michelin stars (although only three other Spanish restaurants boast that distinction) or the top rating in Spain's most influential food guide. The accolades from other cooks are dazzling. He is ''the best cook on the planet,'' the quintessentially French Joel Robuchon, who has garnered similar reviews himself, told the press a decade ago. (When I spoke with Robuchon, he backpedaled a little, saying carefully, ''Ferran is the best cook in the world for technique.'') Juan Mari Arzak, a three-star chef who is considered a father of new Spanish cuisine, told me, ''Ferran is the most imaginative cook in all history.''
Visiting El Bulli for the first time last fall, I discovered what they were talking about. Adrià was celebrating his 20th anniversary at the restaurant with a seasonlong retrospective of his greatest hits. The menu included 30 tapas-size dishes, each identified by the date of its introduction. Indicative of Adrià's accelerating creativity, most were from the previous three years. Welcoming cocktails of a frozen whisky sour and a foam mojito were accompanied by popcorn that had been powdered and reconstituted as kernels and a tempura of rose petals. The Catalan mainstay of pa amb tom àquet, which is grilled bread rubbed with tomato and drizzled with olive oil, was deconstructed into a white sorbet made from skinned tomatoes and topped with a dry cracker that was filled with olive oil. A chicken croquette contained liquid consomme. A ''Kellogg's paella'' consisted of puffed Rice Krispies, to which the waiter added an intense seafood reduction; on the side were a small, flash-fried shrimp, a piece of shrimp sashimi and an ampule containing a thick brown extract of shrimp heads that you were instructed to squeeze into your mouth. I vividly recall a cold, grainy heap of foie-gras powder on one side of a soup bowl that contained a hot chicken consomme. ''Don't mix,'' the waiter warned. ''Eat a little of one, then the other.'' (Who would have guessed?) Perhaps the most sublime dish was an array of seven warm gelatin blocks that resembled watercolor paints, each a vivid hue that proved to be a pure essence of a vegetable. I was handed a fresh vanilla bean to smell while eating vanilla-scented whipped potatoes. And so on, for three and a half hours.
Although Adrià stands alone -- ''he is stratospheric, a Martian,'' says his acolyte, the Madrid restaurateur Sergi Arola -- he also rides the crest of a wave. ''It is a movement in Spain,'' Adrià says. ''It is not only me. In a culture with a very strong traditional gastronomy, there is a cuisine for the first time with new techniques and concepts. It is a new nouvelle cuisine.'' Many of these chefs seem like comrades-in-arms, working together to advance their country's cuisines. By contrast, the few French chefs who are pursuing innovative cooking are far-flung and relatively isolated. ''In France, who is doing creative cuisine?'' says Jordi Butron, a 35-year-old new-wave cook who runs Espai Sucre, a fascinating dessert school and restaurant in Barcelona. He names four, then says: ''In Catalonia and the Basque country, there are 12 or 15 restaurants that do creative food on a high level. If you compare all restaurants, France is superior. If you take the 12 or 15 restaurants in France and compare them with the Spanish, I do not know.'' Many Spanish chefs have adopted particular Adrià techniques, but what the best young Spanish cooks value most is Adrià's fearlessness. ''El Bulli has been able to dare,'' Butron says. ''It is easier to do that if you come after the one who did it first.'' For his part, Adrià says, ''The important thing in Spain is there is a lot of passion among the young.''
Spain rising, France resting. The more attention I paid, the more I noticed everywhere this invidious comparison, between smug, stagnant France and innovative, daring Spain. It seemed, as Trotter suggested, a shift in the zeitgeist, and one that is not confined to the kitchen. The outstanding Spanish cultural figure of our time is the ebullient filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who finds humanity in the most despised groups and optimism in the most hopeless situations. His French counterpart? The misanthropic novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose retinal cones register nothing but despair, ugliness and shame.
In this admittedly tinted light, I went to this year's blockbuster art shows in New York: ''Matisse Picasso'' at the Modern and ''Manet/Velázquez'' at the Metropolitan. They were magnificent exhibitions, overstuffed with paintings of thrilling quality. It would be terribly crass to think of either show as a mano-a-mano (or, to use the linguistically neutral American term, a bake-off). And yet. . . . For me the great revelation of ''Matisse Picasso'' was seeing Picasso's 1930 ''Acrobat'' and realizing that, two decades before Matisse created his cutouts of ''Acrobats'' and ''Blue Nudes,'' the Spaniard issued a template for them. Similarly, at the Met it was enlightening to come upon Manet's large full-length portraits (in which the mid-19th-century French artist set his subjects in spatially indeterminate but color-graded fields) immediately after walking through a breathtaking array of the Velazquez paintings, created two centuries earlier, that inspired them. Or, having examined a roomful of Goyas, to take another look at Manet's self-conscious models (who are so patently aware of the painter's presence), his realistic genre scenes of life high and low and his loose, bravura handling of paint, and wonder if it doesn't all seem a little . . . derivative. Don't get me wrong. The Manets and Matisses are ravishing, masterly paintings. However, in a chronological record of innovation, the works of Velázquez, Goya and Picasso take precedence.
There is a cook who reminds me of Matisse, that supreme colorist who dangerously harmonized reds, oranges and mauves that shouldn't be capable of coexisting on the same canvas. His name is Pierre Gagnaire, and he is the most out-there Michelin three-star chef in France. On route to Spain, I invited a college friend, Whit Stillman, to join me for lunch in Paris at Gagnaire's eponymous restaurant. I was hoping Stillman could give me another American perspective on Spain versus France, or more particularly, on Barcelona versus Paris. The writer-director of the film ''Barcelona,'' which follows the fortunes of a few Americans based in the Catalan capital, Stillman hails from New York, but he moved to Barcelona in 1991 and lived there for two years, with his wife, Irene, who is a native of that city. In 1998, the Stillmans, who had returned to New York, once again pulled up stakes and relocated to an apartment in a 17th-century hôtel particulier in the old heart of Paris.
''The only great American I knew in Barcelona was on the lam from the F.B.I.,'' Stillman said as the food arrived in clusters of small dishes. Gagnaire's menu is poetically composed around products, regions or seasons. To start, I ordered ''the Catalan country'' and was brought four different items, beautifully arranged on porcelain plates. It was a flavor reverie of the region I was about to visit, and along with some of the seafood for which the Costa Brava is famous (tiny squid, large shrimp, cod) and Spanish hot and sweet peppers, the dishes contained strange ingredients, like a minuscule sea cucumber called ''espardeigne.'' There were too many flavors for me to focus. The food shimmered in my mind, like an exotic dream. ''The other interesting person was Marc Rich,'' Stillman was saying. ''The interesting Americans in Barcelona were there because they couldn't be extradited. In Paris, the people who come from all over tend to be excellent. They're coming from achievement or a positive factor. In Barcelona, it was the dregs.''
Raffish, scruffy Barcelona, with its seedy Gothic quarter and its Gaudí buildings that rigorously eschew right angles. Compare that with monumental Paris, a bourgeois heaven, where Haussmann's boulevards radiate clearly, the Notre-Dame cathedral has been scrubbed tan and our lunch cost a bit over $500 for two. If you want to stay out all night in Paris, of course you can -- but in Barcelona, you pretty much have to. The restaurants don't start filling up for dinner until around 10, so a meal segues smoothly into a post-midnight round of clubbing. In the gentrifying El Born district, which has the energy of New York's Lower East Side poured into Barcelona's gracious Modernismo architecture, you can toss down a few drinks with some Sichuan-pepper yucca chips at Santa Maria, pop in to Comerç 24 for the Adrià alum Carles Abellan's onion tempura with soy foam and stumble over to the dessert restaurant, Espai Sucre, where my five-course menu culminated in a smoky lapsang-souchong-tea cream served on a plate with a chocolate-coffee cake, a black sesame-seed wafer, a scoop of chocolate ice cream, a few grapes and a puddle of sour yogurt. Then it's time to go dancing!
Maybe I should confess that my own stodgy predilection is for early-morning Barcelona, particularly a stroll through the Boqueria, the old market on the Ramblas, to ogle some of the most beautiful fish in the world. Once upon a time, you could have had a similar experience in Paris, but that was before the fresh-food markets were banished to the suburbs and Les Halles was converted into a place to buy fast food and cheap clothing, or to log on at an Internet cafe.
I wanted to get Stillman's take on one of the summer's most talked-about independent movies, ''L'Auberge Espagnole,'' but for reasons of aggrieved proprietorship, which I completely understand, he had avoided seeing a successful movie about young foreigners living in Barcelona. Cédric Klapisch's film follows a Parisian youth named Xavier to Barcelona, where he is learning Spanish in preparation for a career in business. The Paris that we see in the movie is the Paris that has sprung up in the last two decades and now encircles the historic quarter: massive, generic office blocks looming over vast soulless plazas. In insouciant contrast, Barcelona in ''L'Auberge Espagnole'' is all palm trees and mosaic-tiled rooftops and late-night music bars. It is young and transgressive, like the Paris of the 50's and 60's that we fell in love with in Truffaut's ''Shoot the Piano Player'' and Malle's ''Zazie Dans le Métro'' and Godard's ''Breathless.'' (Klapisch's Paris is what Godard, back in 1967 in ''Two or Three Things I Know About Her,'' warned was coming.) When a beautiful fellow citoyenne says to Xavier, ''What an awful smell; Barcelona is such a dirty city,'' it is a tip-off that she is horribly repressed. Barcelona embodies freedom, Paris corporate lifelessness.
At the end of the film, having completed his language course, Xavier returns to his mother's home for a celebratory meal before taking up his white-collar drudgery. One look at the conventional steak au poivre sizzling grimly in a skillet and you feel in your gut Xavier's panicky sauve qui peut impulse to escape Paris at all cost. He must stay true to Spain, a country where creativity, exuberance and personal style are valued over money and status. For this American viewer, Klapisch's film came as the clincher. Spain has become the new France.
Standing in Ferran Adrià's kitchen at El Bulli, it is easy to believe that you have slipped down the rabbit hole. Adrià, who would have been the caterer of choice for the Mad Hatter, invents food that provokes all the senses, including the sense of disbelief. His success is almost as amazing as his food. Snaring a table at El Bulli is an extreme sport of the international gourmandoisie, akin to getting a 3-year-old into the nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. Open for only six months a year, solely for dinner, the restaurant can accommodate 8,000 diners in a season. Last year, more than 300,000 callers requested a table.
When I visited in late June, Adrià was refining a new pet concept, which he calls ''liquid ravioli.'' During the six months that the restaurant on the Costa Brava is closed, he works on new recipes in a ''laboratory'' near the Barcelona market with his younger brother and collaborator, Albert, and with Oriol Castro, one of his two chefs de cuisine. A stylish duplex in an 18th-century mansion, the ''Taller el Bulli,'' as it is called, has an ultramodern kitchen that is frighteningly well equipped -- the spice rack holds 720 jars. During the summer season, however, the laboratory is moved to the restaurant kitchen in Rosas. There Adrià convenes in the afternoon (lunchtime at more traditional establishments) with Albert and Castro.
On the day I watched, Adrià and Castro (Albert was traveling) began by spooning pea puree into a plastic tray that was filled with a clear liquid at room temperature. Like invisible ink, the green puree in the magic solution began to take solid form. When it had cohered satisfactorily, Castro scooped it out and rinsed it in a second tray, which I guessed held water. (No one was saying: ''It's a game to see how long it can stay in our hands,'' Adrià said, and laughed. Later, he e-mailed the recipe. The mysterious element in the first bath was calcium chloride, which reacts with alginate, a kelp extract, in the puree.) Castro put the bright green ''ravioli'' into a little dish and handed it to me. I cut it open with a spoon, and the ravioli dissolved into soup. ''It is a revolutionary technique, and there are thousands of things to do with it,'' Adrià said enthusiastically.
Adrià, who is 41, is a compact, dark-haired man, who speaks a raspy and guttural Catalan, Castilian Spanish and (in our case) French, in a voice that hisses and sputters like a severed electrical line. ''You know 'chaud-froid,' the classic technique of Escoffier?'' he asked. In the late 19th century, Auguste Escoffier, the chef at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, codified and refined the recipes of French cuisine, including one -- chaud-froid -- in which meat is first cooked, then chilled, to be served with a cold aspic. ''This is like chaud-froid.''
As we spoke, Castro was peeling a quail egg, then placing it in a spoon, which he dipped into a consomme. Carefully, he slid the contents of the spoon into the mysterious bath. ''It's the new poached egg,'' he said, laughing. The new technique is indeed very adaptable. When a liquid is squeezed into the bath from a pipette, the droplets form kernels with the consistency of salmon roe. Instead of ravioli, you have caviar. ''It is not ravioli; it is not caviar,'' Adrià said. ''It is something different.'' He was coating individual salmon eggs with the pea puree. ''It's caviar of caviar,'' he said. Wouldn't that be awfully difficult to serve to the 50-odd nightly diners who consume a tasting menu of some 30 small courses? ''Afterward, we will devise a production system,'' he said. ''Now it is anarchy.''
Albert Adrià came up with the concept of ''liquid ravioli'' or ''liquid caviar'' in March, after sampling a popular Asian drink made with tapioca pearls. The Bulli creative team has been developing and honing the technique ever since. As I watched, Castro sprinkled black droplets of squid ink into the solution. ''This will be eggs of squid,'' Adrià said. ''You understand? It is not creativity -- blah, blah, blah. It is a lot of work.'' As the eggs congealed, Adrià flash-cooked a few tiny octopi under a high-heat salamander broiler. Then he arranged each grilled creature with a dollop of the faux caviar and added salt. ''It's magic,'' he said, beaming at his creation. ''For us it's magic. You close your eyes, you're eating little squid with its eggs. If you eat the squid first, then the caviar, you do not get the emotion. That's why it's important that the servers tell the clients how to eat.'' While Castro experimented with different-size droplets, Adrià absent-mindedly popped the remaining baby octopi into his mouth,
''Liquid ravioli,'' aka ''caviar,'' is only one of Adrià's new notions this season. As he and Castro worked, a young man in preparation for dinner was boiling milk in low flat pans, then skimming off the skin that formed on the top and storing it between plastic sheets. Adrià took inspiration from the soy-milk tofu wrappers in Chinese dim sum. ''The concept is milk as a pasta,'' he said. ''That leads to incredible things -- ravioli, cannelloni.'' He took a milk skin and wrapped it around a little chopped basil and garlic. We each ate one -- a pesto ravioli. He smiled. ''The aftertaste,'' he said. He swabbed another milk skin with some melted Idiazabal cheese. ''I am making a crepe Idiazabal,'' he said.
Castro brought over a handful of fresh almonds. ''Four almonds, very simple: sugared, salted, acid, bitter,'' Adrià explained. ''The four basic tastes. For me, it is very sensual, this dish.''
Castro said: ''It is very simple, and it is also very complex.'' He dipped an almond in a coating of sugar and handed it to Adrià. One bite, and Adrià shook his head. He wanted more sugar. ''I don't like light tastes,'' he said to me. ''I like tastes. . . . '' He snapped his fingers. Then he bit into a newly doctored almond that Castro gave him. ''No,'' he said. ''More, more.'' The third rendition satisfied him. We cleared our palates with a little glass of clear tomato extract, and Castro began salting almonds. ''It is either magic or it isn't,'' Adrià said. He added some salt to his almond. ''It makes you reflect, and cuisine should do that. The most important thing is to make people happy, but the second sometimes is to give them something to think about.'' He drank a little juice and tasted a very sour almond. He nodded vehemently. ''That is the limit,'' he said. ''We are seeking the limit.'' He suggested to Castro that they serve the dish with ice water, rather than tomato extract, so that people will not be distracted from the concept. The four almonds will be presented on a black block. ''White and black, very minimal,'' Adrià said. ''Four little things -- four basic tastes -- and just cold water. People will remember this all their lives.''
Adrià, the son of a Barcelona house painter, is entirely self-taught. He was working in the kitchen at El Bulli 21 years ago when the executive chef quit, and Juli Soler, the farsighted manager, promoted him. Back then, El Bulli (the name means ''bulldog'') was merely a good seaside roadhouse. Adrià began cooking classic French cuisine. In the archives at the Taller Bulli, I saw an old menu: saffron-mussel soup, entrecote with morels and cream, roast leg of lamb for two. ''I was a conventional, traditional cook,'' Adrià told me. ''I made langouste salad in many ways.'' During the off season, he would travel in France, often with Soler, to critique the leading restaurants. He credits his conversion to a day in Nice in 1986 when he attended a cooking demonstration by Jacques Maximin, a brilliant and influential chef renowned for respecting no boundaries. Adrià recalls that someone in the audience asked, ''What is creativity?'' and Maximin replied, ''Don't copy.'' The words became Adrià's mantra. With Soler's support, he transformed El Bulli into a restaurant unlike any other. Since 1990, they have owned it jointly.
With Adrià, I walked across the huge kitchen (at 3,000 square feet, it is the same size as the two dining rooms combined) to the cold section, where frozen packages of commercial mandarin-orange juice were slowly thawing. The thin liquid that rises to the top would be discarded, leaving an intensely flavored residue. ''Everyone mixes it, but they are not looking,'' Adrià said. He had observed the separation late last summer but waited until this season to make something of it; inspirations that strike after July are postponed a year. ''It's not a concept -- O.K., it's a concept, reducing the essence of tangerine -- but it's a little path,'' Adrià said. ''The caviar is a big path.'' Castro appears with some spring onions and a canister of powdered green tea, and they discuss what else to add. The discussion consists of Castro making suggestions and Adrià rejecting them, until the idea of walnut oil finds favor. However, when Castro returns with some, Adrià shakes his head. Too heavy and strong. Castro fetches hazelnut oil.
Adrià delicately brushes a spring onion with hazelnut oil and places it alongside a puddle of tangerine essence that is the color of egg yolk. He tastes. Like the No. 2 wolf in the pack, Castro takes the second taste.
''It needs something,'' Castro says.
''It needs a little more onion,'' Adrià said. ''I love this dish. There is nobody who will ever have eaten something like this before.'' He turned to me. ''There are clients who look at things, and those who don't look at anything,'' he said. ''There are those who think, This is magic, this mandarin, and those who will not notice. Our work here is to make new things. That simple. No one makes a plane trip to eat classic cuisine. It is very good, a tournedos Rossini, but it is another emotion.''
On the plate, he sprinkled a mixture of granulated sugar and green-tea powder. He tasted it. Then from the canister, he added a little of the bitter green-tea powder and tasted again. He was satisfied.
The other starring concept to make its debut this season is something Adrià calls ''air.'' I had encountered air earlier, on my previous visit to El Bulli, in September of last year. At that time, I talked with Adrià about some of his more celebrated and influential creations, including ''foam,'' in which he aerates sauces with a nitrous-oxide siphon that is ordinarily used to whip cream, and ''warm gelatin,'' in which he adds a seaweed powder called agar to stabilize beef gelatin without chilling it. ''April 14, 1994, was the day of the first foam,'' he said last September. ''Hot jellies date from June 20, 1998.'' His dark restless eyes looked tired, as if oppressed by the weight of all this history and the responsibility of maintaining his position as the world's most creative chef. Then he smiled. ''Another day is Sept. 18, 2002,'' he said. I looked at him quizzically; that was just two days before. ''Foams are out -- for us,'' he said. ''I have created something five times lighter than the foams. The new texture that I create is air. In the bathroom there is the bath foam. This is the same texture.''
A few more questions and his discretion dissipated. ''You will be the first journalist to see it,'' he said. He asked Castro to make preparations in the kitchen. ''It is only done with the product, nothing else,'' he explained. ''For example, the carrot is only carrot juice, nothing else.'' When Castro was ready, we went into the kitchen. Like a magician, Adrià had me taste a bowl of celery juice to verify that it contained nothing else. Then he applied an electric mixer. Within a minute, the liquid had turned into bubble bath. He brought it out onto the patio. He beamed happily, his cares temporarily evaporated. I couldn't decide whether he looked more like a father whose child had uttered a first word or a little boy who finds a bicycle under the Christmas tree. In my mouth, the new ''air'' lacked almost all substance, but embodied the essence of celery.
On my visit in June, Adrià served a carrot air with mandarin-orange concentrate -- an intensified, gossamer version of chilled carrot-orange soup. The next day, we repaired to the small apartment and office that he keeps on the hill above the restaurant. (His wife lives in Barcelona, where she is an aquarium administrator. They go back and forth between Barcelona and Rosas on their days off.) Pulling photographs out of shoebox-size files, he showed me some of the ''airy'' dishes he had made earlier this season. Baby artichokes with pumpkin-seed oil drops on a mandarin-orange coulis with vinegar ''air'' looked especially appealing. ''Now that is over,'' he said. ''No more little artichokes.'' When he says over, he means it. Next year's menu will consist entirely of new plates.
Adrià has every dish photographed, dated, archived and numbered. (There are now 1,200.) Using the archive, his team has been able to realize one of his most ambitious schemes: a huge three-volume work, with an even more complete CD-ROM, that describes each dish. Volume 1, cataloging the most recent dishes, appeared in Spanish late last year; the next volumes, as well as an English translation, are in the works. The tome is organized like Adrià's mind -- methodically. It has copious cross-references and charts that resemble genealogical trees. ''There must be a great deal of order -- and then you can be an artist,'' he says. ''With anarchy, there is not artistry.'' Charlie Trotter told me of a dinner he had with Adrià at the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in Washington. Adrià ordered eight different steaks to be presented at 10-minute intervals, then took a few bites of each one, studying the difference between a porterhouse, a tenderloin, a New York strip.
In the kitchen of El Bulli, I browsed through the loose-leaf book in which Adrià records ideas to explore. Recorded in a minuscule, penciled hand, the notes are organized in categories. Under the label ''Products,'' for example, he has jotted ''Ventresca pescados.'' The ventresca is the most prized belly meat of the tuna; wondering whether he might find its counterpart in other fish, Adrià has written ''salmon, sardine, mackerel.'' The subhead of ''Combinations'' listed honey-potato, coffee-tarragon, salmon-coffee and wasabi-roses. Other main categories in the notebook were ''Techniques and Concepts'' (quinoa risotto, chestnut couscous) and ''Elaboration,'' which went on forever, with such subcategories as waters and infusions; juices; consommes and soups (there were about 40 of them); liquid creams; purees; gelatins; and cheese and other milk products (the milk skin was here, with sub-subheadings of ''filled or ''plain,'' and different variations on crepes and stuffed pasta).
The aspect of the published book of which Adrià seems proudest is its historical preciseness. ''It is important to talk about an evolving analysis,'' he said. In his office, he picked up a worn copy of Michel Guérard's 1978 cookbook, ''Cuisine Gourmande,'' a bible of nouvelle cuisine. ''For me, Michel Guérard's book is the main one,'' he said. He leafed through the pictures and recipes. ''What year is this dish? What year is this?'' he said. ''It's as if one were talking of art and they say, 'Picasso, what year was that painting?' and you say, 'I don't know.' If we want to talk seriously of creativity, it is necessary that all cooks make a catalog for people a hundred years from now. People ask: 'Where did nouvelle cuisine come from? Bocuse, Guérard?' No one can say. Frédy Girardet, for me one of the great cooks, has this book. . . . '' He pulled it off the shelf. ''One looks at it and doesn't know if this dish is from '83 or '96.'' In other words, who could tell if the recipe was ahead of its time? ''It is like the cinema. If you see 'Terminator 1,' you think it is amazing, but when you see it after 'Terminator 2,' the special effects don't seem so fantastic. When you talk of cuisine relatively, you must know when it is done.''
While much culinary history may be murky, the birthdate of nueva cocina in Spain is not. At the end of 1976, Paul Bocuse visited Madrid to speak at a conference. The chef-proprietor of a restaurant outside Lyon, Bocuse was the most exuberant exponent of nouvelle cuisine, the renaissance that transformed French cooking by making it lighter (more olive oil, less butter and cream), fresher (local and seasonal products), broader (ingredients from Asia and other exotic lands) and prettier (plate dressing as elegant as a Japanese flower arrangement). In Bocuse's audience in Madrid were two young Basque chefs working in San Sebastián who were exhilarated by what they heard: Juan Mari Arzak, who was cooking at the restaurant Arzak, established by his grandfather, and Pedro Subijana, who had just started working at Akelarre. When they introduced themselves to Bocuse, he invited them to come stay with him in Lyon for 10 days. ''He is the best ambassador France has ever had,'' says Subijana, a charming, courtly man with a big handlebar mustache.
The timing was auspicious for a new culinary movement in Spain. One year earlier, the death of Generalissimo Franco had released the country from a repressive dictatorship. Everything new was welcome -- and the fresh wind that stirred up Spanish film, literature and design also swept into the kitchen. Although the Basque country had a rich gastronomic tradition and an unsurpassed supply of seafood, meat and vegetables, chefs in the restaurants were backward compared with their counterparts across the border in France. ''There were grand traditional restaurants,'' says Subijana, whose Akelarre now has two Michelin stars. ''All the menus were the same. They were lies.'' Back in San Sebastián, he and Arzak organized a group of a dozen chefs, who met regularly to discuss how to create menus that would renovate forgotten traditional dishes and invent new ones, all based on regional products. Every month or two, each cook invited four progressive customers to attend, free of charge, a group dinner of new Basque cuisine at one of the restaurants. Before the chefs realized what was happening, they had created a movement. Subijana knew the new cuisine had arrived when other cooks in the area began asking if they could join up.
Blessed with proximity to the sea (and, as that patriotic French chef Robuchon emphasizes, ''profiting from being near the best cuisine in the world''), the Basque country and Catalonia have nourished the new Spanish cuisine from the start. Behind Arzak and Subijana came Hilario Arbelaitz of Zuberoa, near San Sebastián, and Santi Santamaria of El Raco de Can Fabes, near Barcelona. In the next generation, the leaders are Adrià and the Basque three-star chef Martin Berasategui. The ranks grow larger among the young. Two Basques -- Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz and Isaac Salaberria of Fagollaga -- struck me as most impressive, but I also had several remarkable meals cooked by young chefs in Barcelona.
Going to Spain now evokes the excitement I felt in the 80's, dining in France at the nouvelle cuisine restaurants of Alain Chapel and Alain Senderens. Can you still get that frisson in France -- the sense that you are eating something both new and authentic? Olivier Roellinger and Pierre Gagnaire both create delicately spiced, artfully constructed, personal dishes, but without providing for me any real thrills. Marc Veyrat is, if anything, too flashy: the Adrià influence is very evident in his recent plates, such as a coddled egg that a waiter injects with a syringe full of sour oxalis extract; or an ''Irish coffee'' of duck bouillon topped with corn foam that you sip through a straw while sucking on little bon-bons made of wild caraway. It is usually delicious, but it can get a little forced and exhausting. Only Michel Bras, in his Zen-like restaurant in the remote Aubrac, maintains the tradition of originality and purity that animated nouvelle cuisine. Tellingly, so many of the best young Spanish chefs cite him as their hero that I suspect he may have more acolytes in Spain than in his native France.
It's hard to explain what happened to nouvelle cuisine in France. Maybe it just got old. Certainly, French cooking rests on an enviable base, with more solid, midlevel restaurants than exist in any other country. There is also a French public that has been eating in fine restaurants for centuries, ever since the Revolution forced cooks out of their perches in aristocratic residences. Even the irascible and powerful Spanish food writer, Rafael García Santos, who is scathing about the quality of contemporary French cuisine, respects the taste of the French populace. ''They have the best public,'' he says. ''But they haven't got cooks who want to change the world.''
Culinary bravado is essential in Spain, where most of the public appears to be baffled, not unreasonably, by the restaurants that have captured the critics' approbation. Jordi Vila, the talented 29-year-old chef at Alkimia in Barcelona, says that he offers ''two lines -- one for the great public, with mutton, monkfish, artichokes, and one with gastronomic dishes.'' The best thing I ate at Alkimia was a clear green-apple gazpacho, which contained a perfect briny oyster, cockles, green-bean puree and yogurt dots. ''Gazpacho with oysters, two or three will like it, and two or three won't,'' Vila explains. ''I am very happy with the experimental things; the public is not always. You have to do it slowly.''
There were not many other people in the dining room the night I ate at Fagollaga, near San Sebastián, but there should have been. Isaac Salaberria is a post-Adrià chef with a style of his own. As part of the movement toward lightness that began with the emulsified blender sauces of nouvelle cuisine and continues with Adrià's foam and air, Salaberria, 32, a large man with a small voice, has taken the sauce off the plate entirely and reimagined it as a shot glass of juice or soup. Most memorable was a small slab of fatback from an Iberian pig, served with almond milk, in a brilliant marriage of richnesses. ''I like to have the original flavor of the product,'' Salaberria says, in a credo I heard from other chefs of his generation. ''I am looking for the maximum lightness and the maximum flavor.''
If it is true, as García Santos claims, that unlike their Spanish counterparts, young French chefs are primarily looking for money, the reason may be a social problem, not a character flaw. Taxes and labor benefits make France a very expensive place to run a restaurant. It is hard, for proprietor and customer alike, to disregard money. A dinner for two chez Marc Veyrat, with modest wines, will easily exceed $800. ''The social charges are too heavy,'' Veyrat says, as an explanation for his nosebleed-inducing checks. In addition to the benefits that the proprietor provides for his staff, which the customer pays indirectly, the state slaps on a blatant 19.6 percent value-added tax to the bill. The comparable Spanish tax is 7 percent. Furthermore, France in 1998 legislated a mandatory 35-hour work week as an antidote to an unemployment rate that had exceeded 12 percent. Not implemented until 2000, the 35-hour rule has enraged restaurateurs, who traditionally work long hours. In France it would be unthinkable to have a labor-intensive establishment like El Bulli -- even if it weren't closed for lunch. For its one daily service with about 50 customers, El Bulli employs 30 or more cooks (a number that includes many unsalaried short-term apprentices, as is the custom throughout the high-end dining world).
How can a French chef turn a profit? Robuchon addressed the challenge this spring by opening simultaneously, in Tokyo and Paris, a new concept: L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon. Behind a handsome rosewood bar (I ate in Paris, but the Tokyo restaurant is reported to be identical), either Robuchon personally or one of his distinguished fellow chefs prepares and serves the food to the patron, as in a sushi or tapas bar. There are 20 people working in the kitchen, with 200 people showing up daily for a seat at the counter. (By comparison, at the three-star restaurant that Robuchon closed in 1996, a kitchen staff of 25 fed 45 clients at each meal.) The food I ate at the Atelier de Robuchon was delicious, but it was hardly innovative or particularly creative. How could it be otherwise? The Atelier concept is designed to be rolled out profitably in big cities around the world. And the average bill, it should be noted, comes to about $75 a head.
Adrià and Soler charge about $150 a person, without wine, for dinner at El Bulli. Not cheap, but once you see what goes into it, you realize it's not overpriced. Adrià observes that he could follow the law of supply and demand by doubling or tripling the price, but he doesn't want to limit the restaurant to obscenely rich people. As it is, El Bulli just breaks even. Adrià supports the operation with product lines, consulting projects and a nascent group of El Bulli Hotels. (So far there is just one hotel, in Seville.) ''I don't want to be a millionaire, but I want to be able to live,'' he says. ''I have 60 employees. It is impossible without the businesses. Here at El Bulli, I do not think of money. I make zero. If tomorrow the lottery gives me $10 million, I close the businesses.''
The belief that cooking is more than a means to nourish the client and enrich the cook -- that it can be an art form -- propels the best chefs in Spain. Unlike such surviving grand old men of nouvelle cuisine as Paul Bocuse and Michel Troisgros, the founding fathers of nueva cocina have continued to reinvent their styles. At Akelarre, I ate a mollusk soup that bubbled when hot broth was poured over a white foam in the bowl. Arzak's restaurant was closed for vacation when I was in Spain, but where was the chef taking his holiday? In Rosas, where he could hang out in the kitchen of his friend Adrià. There I met him -- an infectiously jolly man of 61. I had eaten at his San Sebastián restaurant, but that was years ago, and in the meantime, his daughter Elena had moved into the kitchen alongside him. ''I began by evolving the cuisine of my mother, very gently,'' he told me. ''My évolution forte began four years ago. I was looking for a new path.'' He and Elena now serve such avant-garde dishes as smoked tuna with warm tomato-licorice-pistachio gelatin triangles and a fig-pine nut garnish. They espouse the tradition of inventing new traditions.
"A"> year ago, Ferran Adrià's younger brother, Albert, told me: ''For me, Andoni Luis Aduriz is the future of Spanish cooking.'' So I cannot say I went to Aduriz's Mugaritz restaurant, in the countryside a half-hour from San Sebastián, with no expectations.
My lunch companion was the food critic Rafael García Santos, 48, who along with writing a weekly column for the national newspaper group Correo, publishes the best restaurant guide to Spain and coordinates an annual food congress in San Sebastián. He has been instrumental in the rise of the best Spanish chefs, and he is not bashful about letting you know it. Aduriz is one of two former El Bulli chefs who have gone off to make a great success. The other, Sergi Arola, runs the Michelin two-star La Broche in Madrid. My meal at La Broche had disappointed me. A carpaccio of scallops, shrimp and duck liver, with a dollop of green apple puree and a ring of smoked aioli, typified the problem. ''When you eat this in your mouth, the texture is raw,'' explained Arola, who is 35. ''But at the same time, I trick your brain with the flavor of the mayonnaise that is roasted.'' My brain was not tricked. The mushy textures of the three components trumped any suggestion that they had been roasted.
''It is like an exception in Spain that he is not doing something better,'' García Santos said harshly, when I mentioned my meal at La Broche. ''He wants too much to be in every place. He is not in the kitchen. That is the illness of modern chefs.'' Arola cooks in a style that is recognizably Ferranista. He says that he is most influenced by the cooking of El Bulli from 1985 to 1993, when Adrià was deconstructing traditional Spanish dishes. Like Picasso, one of whose fertile periods could spawn an entire career for Henry Moore, Adrià keeps changing. Chefs who cook in his style are not cooking in his spirit. Adrià speaks fondly of both of his proteges, but he distinguishes between them. ''Sergi makes his own cuisine, but in this style,'' Adrià says. ''He is very honest. He says, 'My cuisine makes a reference to El Bulli.' I am very content with him.'' As for Aduriz? ''Andoni wants to create a style of his own,'' Adrià says. ''He is a great, great cook, with great possibilities. It is difficult to create a new style, very difficult. He is trying.''
When Santos and I arrived at Mugaritz, which is a handsome modern dining room in a pretty, rural setting, Aduriz, a shy, boyishly handsome man of 32 who looks about half his age, came to greet us. He recited the menu he had prepared to García Santos, who knitted his brow, rubbed his beard and scowled. ''And the bacalao, no? It is very good,'' he said. Aduriz nodded. He would substitute salt cod for another fish on the menu.
From the outset, it was evident that Aduriz had not been oversold. Most of the dozen items on the menu were presented in a shallow bowl, into which the waiter poured a hot soup. ''I try in every dish to have something that envelops it,'' the chef explained. ''I love the feeling of an integral taste. And there are two different smells -- one when it comes, and then different when they drop the liquid on it.'' A slow-cooked piece of beef rested in a clear broth redolent of roasted peppers. ''This is a revolutionary way of doing a rustic taste,'' García Santos said. ''Roasted pepper is a usual taste here, it is in all dishes -- but not in this form.''
Aduriz worked both for Adrià and for his major rival, Martin Berasategui, the Michelin three-star chef of the same generation, whose restaurant is in a suburb of San Sebastián. Another self-taught chef, Berasategui cooks in a style that is more identifiably French, making use of cream, for example. He is less revolutionary than Adrià, but also very influential. On the new menu of the well-regarded young American chef Wylie Dufresne, at WD-50 on the Lower East Side, I spotted two dishes -- a foie gras terrine topped with anchovies and a thin sheet of pounded oysters -- that were modified renditions of Berasategui plates.
Aduriz has been cooking at his own restaurant for five years. ''The first two years I had to decontaminate, in a positive sense,'' he told me. ''I come from two places with a very strong identity, El Bulli and Martin Berasategui. Sometimes you think, What would he do? You have to take that off, to start doing your own cuisine.'' In his cooking, the radical breakthroughs in technique that are so obvious at El Bulli are less apparent. What he has taken from Adrià is a guiding philosophy. ''I met the most passionate people I ever met in the kitchen,'' he says. ''In '93, when I was first in El Bulli, the real important thing was the gastronomy. They were losing a lot of money, there were no customers, but people were every day thinking the most important thing was how to do a foam.''
That idealism is what I find so compelling at the best Spanish restaurants, and so sadly missing in France. The nouvelle cuisine movement burgeoned at the end of the hopeful 60's, nurtured by a belief that honest cooking -- mindful of culinary tradition, natural products and individual creativity -- could make a better world. That optimism has curdled. Besieged with soaring costs and smothering regulations, French chefs think more imaginatively about brand extension than about recipe invention. They cling to past glory, to a tradition of nouvelle cuisine that is becoming as hoary as Escoffier. In Spain, as García Santos says, young chefs still touchingly believe that they can change the world.
Aduriz realizes that most of his patrons fail to recognize his ambitions. ''If I thought people were just coming to eat, as 95 percent of people do, I wouldn't do this,'' he admits. But a creator cannot think that way. ''The Spanish cooks understood they have to do an artistic cuisine, whether or not people understand,'' García Santos says. He is the Ortega y Gasset of the food world: like the Spanish essayist, he loathes the mass taste that predominates around him. ''Picasso would never have painted as he did if he cared whether people liked his painting,'' he continues. ''There are only a few people who know about food. Do you think there are more than 10,000 people who like Ferran Adrià's food? The difference in Spain is, nobody likes or understands what El Bulli does, as nobody understands the way of painting of Picasso, but nobody says it is just nothing. In Spain, a minority cuisine can convert the ideology of a country and become the dominant ideology.'' He looks around the Mugaritz dining room. ''Tell me, how many restaurants are there in France where you can eat this way? There are seven or eight in Spain. In France, there are one or two. But in Spain there are a lot of young cooks who want to do this, and that is the important thing.'' He shakes his head. ''It's a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learned there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.''
Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about Goya's Black Paintings. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/magazine/10SPAIN.html?pagewanted=1
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