12 ways elBulli changed the food world

After 12 years without welcoming guests, “the restaurant that changed everything” reopens as a museum this week. ElBulli, the most influential epicentre of modern cuisine in recent decades, is back, but without serving meals this time. In its mythical space of almost 4000 square metres in Roses, in the interior of Catalonia, Spain, a cultural centre with 69 installations has taken shape for visitors to pay homage to the legacy of elBulli and understand why the restaurant was a milestone in the gastronomic world.

Now rebranded as elBulli 1846 – in homage to the number of recipes trailblazing chefs Ferran and Albert Adrià and team created there from 1998 onwards – the new space counts on installations (mixing arts and audiovisual exhibitions) to tell the story of the restaurant through memorabilia and historical objects, including over 100 ideas that Adrià painted from 2012 onwards using only paints and cotton swabs, and innovative utensils that were created or adapted by elBulli to a professional kitchen – such as siphons, dehydrators and lyophilizers.

Visitors will also have the opportunity to (re)visit the restaurant’s famous main room, with the original wooden chairs, napkins and glasses used at the time. A large screen will show archive videos of the cooks working at elBulli. It is the first restaurant in the world to have such a space dedicated to its own history, which proves the role of elBulli in gastronomy’s annals. Below, we list 12 ways (one for each year of its hiatus) the restaurant forever changed the fine-dining game.

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1. Cep carpaccio

"The carpaccio that defined an era", as Spanish Real Academia de Gastronomia (Gastronomy Royal Academy) pointed out. Created in 1989, it's one of elBulli's most famous and oldest signature dishes. The cep carpaccio is covered with ingredients such as pine nuts, black truffles and rabbit kidneys. The creation paved the way for the popularity of vegetable and mushroom carpacci in the fine-dining scene.

2. Cocktails

The elBulli team pioneered cocktails as proper dishes from the late 1990s, creating a new connection between bars and restaurants. Many came in glasses: sometimes creamy (to eat with a spoon), others more liquid, to sip, such as the iconic hot frozen passion fruit whisky sour.

3. Deconstruction

The first takes in the food world transforming traditional classics into different dishes (but mostly with the same ingredients/flavours) were done at elbulli. Iconic Spanish tortilla (served in a martini glass), pollo al curry (chicken curry), arroz a la cubana (Cuban-style white rice) and other presentations had little in common with the dishes they represented, with the original dish rebuilt in different structures, plating and textures.

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4. Ice cream

ElBulli pioneered savoury ice creams in haute cuisine, creations that weren’t sweet, but salty – “instead of vanilla, cheese,” Ferran Adrià used to say. Savoury frozen cuisine remained an elBulli style for a long time.

5. Labs

ElBulli started its creative team concept in 1994, long before lab kitchens became commonplace in restaurants around the world. The initiative responded to the need to professionalise the creative process, to give birth to new concepts and techniques. After a few years, elBullitaller emerged, which inspired many restaurants to adopt research and development (R&D) teams and processes.

6. Language

By using industrial techniques and very specific equipment that mostly did not belong to the kitchen universe, the elBulli team transformed the cooking language, including new instruments (and even new notes) with which chefs could now cook. “[ElBulli] proved that the cuisine could be a language in itself,” said chef Joan Roca.

7. Molecular gastronomy

The defining term of elBulli's cuisine was so widely used to explain the work that it has even become an entry in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. According to Britannica, molecular gastronomy is “the scientific discipline concerned with the physical and chemical transformations that occur during cooking.”

8. Rock star chefs

The idea of the cook as a rock star began to take on an international scale with Ferran Adrià. In 10 years, he has given over 400 world conferences, just for one of his sponsors. “Ferran was Frank Zappa,” Juli Soler, Adrià’s former partner, said in the book Ferran: The Inside Story of elBulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food.

9. Science

In 2003, elBullitaller began to work more seriously with science, with the help of experts, such as chemist Pere Castells, to understand what was behind its creations, seeking a more scientific work system, establishing contacts with manufacturers of food products, searching for new devices, gathering information and studying books. Some of the first studies analysed textures (foams, hot jellies, clouds, air, spherification, etc.), to find out how these elaborations were possible. The scientific processes in cooking were fundamental for elBulli and showed other restaurants that this exchange could bear fruit.

10. Spherification

The process which allows the jellification of a liquid – transforming it into a sphere with a thin gel membrane, using sodium alginate – was defined in elBulli’s kitchen. It has become a widely used technique in modernist cuisine, in many ‘caviars’ and even in cocktails served at bars worldwide.

11. Tasting menus

“We all made tasting menus of 10, 12 courses, and he [Ferran] started making 20, 20-somethings,” said chef Juan Mari Arzak in the documentary Las Huellas de elBulli. ElBulli pioneered longer tasting menus, showing that small snacks and highly conceptual dishes also had a place in restaurants.

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12. Tweezers

At elBulli, kitchen staff started using tweezers – an instrument more related to other professions and crafts – instead of sticks (hashi) for precise cooking steps. “Today, all chefs use tweezers. [Then] it was unconventional to see a photo of them carrying tweezers in their pockets,” says designer Luki Humbert.