From A US Blogger RE Ferran Adria
TomorrowsFood was interested to read this recently........ENJOY
Give Us a Break With Ferran Adria Already!
Posted: 27 Oct 2008 10:02 AM CDT
Jay Rayner, Britain’s most famous restaurant critic, wrote a rapturous panegyric to Spanish superchef Ferran Adria last week, but for some reason it’s only making it around to the New York blogs today, and is being conveyed without the slightest bit of skepticism. Rayner, in both video and literary formats, describes his 17-year path to getting a seat at the legendary temple of molecular gastronomy that is Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli; he then submits to a slavish colloquium with the great man that resembles a beardless catechumen sitting at the feet of a stern abbot. The whole thing made me want to throw up, and confirms a feeling I’ve had for a very long time. I am sick of Ferran Adria and don’t want to hear about him any more. Here are the reasons.
1. Nobody has even eaten this guy’s food! If you took all the foodies, gastronauts, bloggers, and fellow-travelers who kvell over this guy’s genius meals, and asked them if they had ever tasted one, not one in a hundred would say yes. As Rayner points out, there are 8000 seats available for two million requests; how many of those are going to be Williamsburg-based bloggers who work at low-rent design shops during the day? None.
2. More to the point, nobody who goes around praising this guy has any experience of or love for the style of food which he represents. Nathan Myrvhold, the Microsoft billionaire and molecular gastronomy whiz, spends a lot of his time eating out at Alinea and Moto and wd-50, so if he wants to tell me he knows all about that style and Adria is the messianic figure he’s made out to be, fine. But don’t eat one meal a year at wd-50 and present yourself as a devotee of pipette cooking and the joys of spheroids. Because I just don’t buy it. You’d rather eat spaghetti. I know it, and you know it.
3. Adria is an incredibly imperious, self-important figure; that pisses me off. It would be one thing if he were earnestly promoting his kind of cooking, but all he does is complain that people don’t understand it, and blah blah blah. His favorite complaint seems to be that it’s overly associated with science. Then he goes around talking about how he figured out a new way to extract the flavor of dirt, or use liquid nitrogen to make olive oil into a gas!
4. Adria worship runs down the achievements of real chefs. I often wonder why so many chefs worship this guy. Don’t you think they could make amazing things if they could take six months off every year to putter around the kitchen? Or if they could sit you down and serve you seventy courses of exactly what they felt like, knowing that you were going to explode with fulsome ecstasy, whether it was good or not? And who’s to say if it even is good? If you haven’t eat at El Bulli, you can’t really say this guy is for real. I’ve never eaten his food. And as King Osric says of Thulsa Doom in Conan The Barbarian, “for years I’ve chafed under this demigod!” When you read The Feedbag in the coming years, expect to hear about Marco Canora, Gavin Kaysen, even Wylie Dufresne: chefs who cook food I can actually eat, and who have to produce every day to stay in business. That’s what a real chef is. Jay Rayner can have his precious seat at El Bulli.
social scientists, educators, food safety activists, grinning figurines, insect-faced anesthesiologists, consumer advocates, evil clowns, and unearthly, disembodied voices are said to be looking into the matter.
Give Us a Break With Ferran Adria Already!
Posted: 27 Oct 2008 10:02 AM CDT
Jay Rayner, Britain’s most famous restaurant critic, wrote a rapturous panegyric to Spanish superchef Ferran Adria last week, but for some reason it’s only making it around to the New York blogs today, and is being conveyed without the slightest bit of skepticism. Rayner, in both video and literary formats, describes his 17-year path to getting a seat at the legendary temple of molecular gastronomy that is Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli; he then submits to a slavish colloquium with the great man that resembles a beardless catechumen sitting at the feet of a stern abbot. The whole thing made me want to throw up, and confirms a feeling I’ve had for a very long time. I am sick of Ferran Adria and don’t want to hear about him any more. Here are the reasons.
1. Nobody has even eaten this guy’s food! If you took all the foodies, gastronauts, bloggers, and fellow-travelers who kvell over this guy’s genius meals, and asked them if they had ever tasted one, not one in a hundred would say yes. As Rayner points out, there are 8000 seats available for two million requests; how many of those are going to be Williamsburg-based bloggers who work at low-rent design shops during the day? None.
2. More to the point, nobody who goes around praising this guy has any experience of or love for the style of food which he represents. Nathan Myrvhold, the Microsoft billionaire and molecular gastronomy whiz, spends a lot of his time eating out at Alinea and Moto and wd-50, so if he wants to tell me he knows all about that style and Adria is the messianic figure he’s made out to be, fine. But don’t eat one meal a year at wd-50 and present yourself as a devotee of pipette cooking and the joys of spheroids. Because I just don’t buy it. You’d rather eat spaghetti. I know it, and you know it.
3. Adria is an incredibly imperious, self-important figure; that pisses me off. It would be one thing if he were earnestly promoting his kind of cooking, but all he does is complain that people don’t understand it, and blah blah blah. His favorite complaint seems to be that it’s overly associated with science. Then he goes around talking about how he figured out a new way to extract the flavor of dirt, or use liquid nitrogen to make olive oil into a gas!
4. Adria worship runs down the achievements of real chefs. I often wonder why so many chefs worship this guy. Don’t you think they could make amazing things if they could take six months off every year to putter around the kitchen? Or if they could sit you down and serve you seventy courses of exactly what they felt like, knowing that you were going to explode with fulsome ecstasy, whether it was good or not? And who’s to say if it even is good? If you haven’t eat at El Bulli, you can’t really say this guy is for real. I’ve never eaten his food. And as King Osric says of Thulsa Doom in Conan The Barbarian, “for years I’ve chafed under this demigod!” When you read The Feedbag in the coming years, expect to hear about Marco Canora, Gavin Kaysen, even Wylie Dufresne: chefs who cook food I can actually eat, and who have to produce every day to stay in business. That’s what a real chef is. Jay Rayner can have his precious seat at El Bulli.
social scientists, educators, food safety activists, grinning figurines, insect-faced anesthesiologists, consumer advocates, evil clowns, and unearthly, disembodied voices are said to be looking into the matter.
posted by Jonathan at 12:57 PM
0 comments
