Take an olive. Wring its pretty neck. Collect the juice,
process it with algae-based gelifiers and calcium carbonate and—hey,
presto!—the liquid turns into a tremulous globule of olive essence, beyond
divine with your martini. It’s subversive and witty, and Ferran Adria does
equally outré, ravishing things to the likes of rabbit tongue, marinated fish
liver, and prehistorically large cardoons, all in the service of flavor and
slaying expectations, setting your hair on fire with his rarefied creations.
But alright already, enough ink has
been spilled singing the praises of the avant-garde Spanish chef. What about
those apprentices in the kitchen, asks Time
magazine correspondent Lisa Abend, the ones actually making and plating much of
the food served at the restaurant elBulli? Her book, The Sorcerer's Apprentices, spends a revealing, dexterously
rendered six months in their company, this troop of unpaid kitchen disciples
known as stagiaires, part of the
feudal tradition whereby young cooks gain direction and purpose from a great
mentor.
They are an elect handful—Abend
closely, sympathetically profiles a half-dozen of them—as lucky to get this
apprenticeship as anyone else is getting a seat at elBulli, and thrilled with
the opportunity, at least at first. “Like all great restaurants, elBulli’s
dazzle rests in large part on the willingness of the apprentices, in the name
of education, to do the dreary work no one else wants to do.” Say, making
2000 lentils a day out of clarified butter and sesame paste. That’s right,
lentils: typical Adria legerdemain.
The man himself remains aloof to
them: “I don’t interact with stagiaires,” Adria snips, very unmentorishly, when one asked for advice. And some
kitchen protocols seem plain weird: not only having to ask to use the bathroom;
what about apprentices not being allowed to sample the food while putting it
together? Too costly, claims Adria, though how’s an apprentice to know if the
rabbit ear with sea anemone is as it should be? Simply execute, my child, as
Adria has plotted every dish to the nth degree. What stagiaires do learn is that the
brilliance of creation is well and good, but the genius is in the hard work of
getting it just so, plate after plate, one perfect counterfeit lentil, one
wobbly olive at a time.
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