Text: Brigitte Müller

His restaurant El Bulli is, according to 560 chefs and critics from different countries, the best restaurant in the world.  Renowned Catalan chef Ferrán Adrià advertises prepared soups, olive oil and French fries, his seal turns hotel restaurants into gold mines, and even unacceptable “fast foods" become, with a small linguistic trick and the name of Ferrán Adrià, "fast goods" with cultural character.  

Everything he touches turns to gold.  Take-away food, catering and mass products have not damaged his good reputation nor the quality of his culinary art, as indicated by the British publication Restaurant Magazine (for many the Bible of gastronomy).  He received the prize for the world’s best restaurant in 2002 in London, and he has just won it again.  But it doesn’t end there:  Ferrán Adrià, El Bulli or culinary art can be considered as a complete artistic work.  Now, this head chef enters the temple of contemporary art.  In 2007 he will be in the Documenta Kassel.  A year remains (June 2007) before we find out what he will showcase at this worldwide artistic vanguard event, before we discover exactly where Kassel is and what the Documenta really is.  "This invitation is something completely different, although I still do not know what" Adrià says.  

It all began in January.  The director of the Catalan museum, Manuel Borja-Villel, organized a meeting between the great chef and the director of the Documenta, Roger Buergel.  Buergel, who apparently had never eaten in El Bulli, was fascinated with the delightful presentation, the different take on traditional flavours and the sense of taste and minimalist philosophy.  To break down and to compose, to transform and to give a  character unlike reality, the master calls it molecular kitchen.  And Buergel loves it.  "With regard to Documenta, art or the meaning of art interest me less, what really interests me is artistic intelligence", he says, explaining the choice.  "For several reasons I refuse to differentiate between independent art and deviated art, as well as to differentiate between material and concept."  

Ferrán Adrià views with serenity the matter relative to art and the kitchen.  "The creator is not the one who decides what is art; that is done by the receiver”, he says with wisdom.  And after all, the exhibition is not a contest in which something has to be proven.  But with total certainty, he will be prepared for this “completely different thing” and will ask Marta Arzak, the daughter of another great chef, his colleague Juan Mari Arzak, who has an important position in the Guggenheim Museum.