Ferran Adria has done things with food never dreamed of or attempted before. He has created thousands of new dishes, and designed new implements for eating them. His influence over the culinary world is unmatched. His story is entwined with the rise of elBulli, the world's most influential restaurant.
With no formal culinary training, Ferran Adria took a traditional restaurant perched on a remote Catalan clifftop, and placed it in the centre of the culinary map. Ferran takes a fresh look at the restaurant that has held three Michelin stars for over a decade, and receives over 2 million requests for the 8,000 places served each year.
The legendary multi-course menus of elBulli are developed by Ferran and his team over months of laboratory experimentation. This unique approach gives elBulli's food an alchemy all its own; for example, tortilla espanola, or Spanish tortilla, becomes a riot of flavour and texture with potato foam, onion puree and egg-white sabayon, through evolving cooking methods that influence the restaurant menus around the world.
Reinventing Food charts Adria's transition from comparative obscurity to becoming the focus of massive media attention – he has been admired, talked about, criticised more than any other chef alive today. Colman Andrews has spent over a decade in conversation with Ferran, as well as countless hours in his restaurant and workshop, and his account recasts Ferran's remarkable career trajectory on an absorbing, human scale.
With unrestricted access to the chef and his family and friends, as well as decades of accumulated insights and interviews with the most prominent chefs and critics, Reinventing Food sheds new light on the most radical culinary innovator of our times. Lively and readable, and full of fresh insights, it will
engage not just food-lovers of food, but anyone who enjoys a remarkable story: the story of how one young chef changed the gastronomic world,
and reinvented food.
About the Author
Colman Andrews is an award-winning food writer, restaurant reviewer and gastronomic commentator based in the USA. He co-founded Saveur magazine and acted as editor-in-chief for four years, and went on to be a contributing editor for Gourmet magazine. He has known Ferran Adria for many years.
Industry Reviews
'by far the best [book] yet written about Adria - Andrews is a discerning and greedy guide to elBulli's flavours - Now, elBulli is evolving again. Adria has announced that it will close at the end of 2011. Foodies worldwide are in mourning. For millions of us who never came close to getting a reservation, Andrew's insightful portrait may be our best hope of understanding what all the fuss was about.' --
Bee Wilson, The Sunday Times, Culture supplement, 19 September 2010
'What is universally undisputed [...] is the fact that Adria, through his catalogue of elBulli creations and standing as the driving force behind the ultimate destination restaurant, has changed the way we eat and think about food, spawning a host of imitators around the world. In Reinventing Food: Ferran Adria [...] Colman Andrews [...] gives a unique insight into Adria's exceptional life story - how a young Catalan with no boyhood interest in food ended up taking over the kitchen of elBulli in 1987 at the age of 25 and evolved to change the gastronomic world forever. The takes the reader through Adria's humble beginnings as a cook during military service [...] through to international recognition as the man behind the world's best restaurant ... a lively and fascinating read.' --
Caterer and Hotelkeeper, 24 September 2010
'the more intriguing story, which Andrews tells very well, is how what started in the 1960s as a hippy beach cafe on an all but unreachable cove became first a restaurant, then a gastronomic restaurant cleaving to the trend for nouvelle cuisine, and then something else entirely, the flag-waver for a vanguard. Hand in hand with this is the story of Adria himself: an ordinary bloke who had been cooking for years before he really committed to it; who as a young man was more interested in football and chasing girls than creating a single morsel of food anybody would remember. - we do get insights into the autodidact's approach to creativity - millions [ - ] year after year, have attempted but failed to get to bag a reservation [at El Bulli]. - For them, this book is as close as they are every likely to get to enjoying El Bulli for themselves.' --
Jay Rayner, The Observer, The New Review, 10 October 2010
