Director: Gereon Wetzel
Starring: Ferran Adrià, Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch
Running Time: 108 Minutes
Certificate: PG
This behind-the-scenes look at Spain’s El Bulli, one of the world’s most famous restaurants, is not a documentary of the conventional kind. There are no questions asked by the production team, no introduction made, and hardly any words spoken. EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS is a raw and truthful film, depicting only what really happens when the world’s number one restaurant tries to exceed everyone’s expectations and outdo itself.
As the documentary begins, the El Bulli chefs are shipped off to Barcelona to set up their ‘lab’, where they spend most of the six months required to develop new flavours, cooking methods and dishes. The restaurant is only open six months each year, and serves only 8000 customers every season; despite this, it receives more than 2 million booking requests and charges roughly £200 a meal. It’s nothing less than fascinating as the Catalan chefs spend hours trying various way of cutting a mushroom, attempting to play with its textures and flavours, and discover which method makes the mushroom the ‘prettiest’. The avant-garde restaurant and its head honcho Ferran Adrià turn the chefs into scientists, experimenting madly with rotary evaporators, heated baths, and carbon dioxide.
Adrià has been running El Bulli since 1987 and is the stereotypical chef, who all and everyone fears. Nothing can be written, confirmed or even discussed unless Adrià nods his head or says, ‘Si, si!’. The master chef knows not only what his customers wants, but also what the press and everyone around the world wants and expects from El Bulli. Constant innovation and thinking – not only outside the box, but also outside the stove – is required.
There have been plenty of cooking-based TV shows over recent years, but EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS should feed and food lover’s appetite more than anything starring Gordon Ramsay. However, the most interesting part of the documentary is head chef Adrià. Director Gereon Wetzel not only struggles to conveying the passion and magic of the cooking, he inadvertently sucks the passion right out of the El Bulli kitchen. The documentary is disappointingly neutral, showing neither enthusiasm or disdain for the complex and perhaps pretentious cooking practices. And there are few things more frustrating than enduring an almost two-hour long film to see the ending, only to realise the director hasn’t bothered putting one in there.
EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS is available on DVD from the 24th September and can be purchased here.
