The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrią's elBulli - Hardcover

Abend, Lisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439175551 ISBN 13: 9781439175552

Publisher: Free Press, 2011

Synopsis

What goes on behind the scenes at elBulli? Elected best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine an unprecedented five times, elBulli is where chef Ferran Adrią's remarkable cuisine comes to life--with dragon cocktails that make the drinker breathe smoke and caviar made from tiny spheres of olive oil. elBulli is also the object of culinary pilgrimage--millions clamor every year for a reservation at one of its tables. Yet few people know that, behind each of the thirtyor more courses that make up a meal at elBulli, a small army of stagiaires--apprentice chefs--labor at the precise, exhausting work of executing Adrią's astonishing vision. In The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrią's elBulli, Lisa Abend explores the remarkable system that Adrią uses to run his restaurant and, in the process, train the next generation of culinary stars. Granted more access to Adrią and the elBulli kitchen than any other writer in the restaurant's history, Abend follows thirty-five young men and women as they struggle to master the cutting-edge techniques, grueling hours, furious creativity, and interpersonal tensions that come with working at this celebrated institution. Her lively narrative captures a great cast, including a young Korean cook who camps on the doorstep of elBulli until he is allowed to work in the kitchen; an ambitious chef from one of Switzerland's top restaurants struggling to create his own artistic vision of cuisine; and an American couple whose relationship may not withstand the unique pressures of the restaurant. What emerges is an irresistible tale of aspiring young talents caught, for good or ill, in the opportunity of a lifetime.Taken together, their stories form a portrait of the international team that helps make a meal at elBulli so memorable. They also reveal a Ferran Adrią few ever see, one who is not only a genius chef and artist but also a boss, teacher, taskmaster, businessman, and sometimes- flawed human being. Today, food has become the focus of unprecedented attention, and The Sorcerer's Apprentices also explores the strange evolution--in less than two decades--of a once-maligned profession into a source of celebrity.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Abend is journalist based in Madrid. Since 2005, she has been Time magazine's correspondent in Spain. She also contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, the New York Times, The Economist, Food and Wine, The Nation, Saveur, AFAR, Wired, and Slate. In a previous life, she was a professor of European history at Oberlin College.

Reviews

For years, chef Adrią's creative and enigmatic culinary genius at his restaurant el Bulli drew not only the attention of the world's top chefs and food critics but also of aspiring culinary artists looking to apprentice there. Food writer Colman Andrews has recently written a biography of Adrią (Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food), and now New York Time's Spain correspondent Abend offers an intimate glimpse of life as a stagiaire—a cook who agrees to work for almost nothing for a season as one of Adrią's apprentices. Weaving the history of the restaurant and Adrią's own story with the threads of the 35 stagiaires who apprenticed at el Bulli from June to December 2009, she captures the intense desire to learn and to please, the demanding pace of the work, and the anxiety over success and failure that drives these young chefs. Some of the stagiaires, unwilling to submit to the ego-crunching drudgery of the work, leave early in the season; others, worried constantly about living up to the demands of the position, settle into a rhythm that carries them through the mundane details of preparing meals and propels them to a new level of culinary skill and inventiveness. Abend's sometimes lively, often plodding narrative provides another dimension to the culinary legend that is el Bulli. (Mar.)
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June, or the Machine

“Quemo. Quemo. Quemo, quemo, quemo. Quemo. QUE-mo!”

The most important thing the stagiaires learn on their first day at elBulli is this word: quemo. Literally, it means “I burn.” The ones who don’t speak Spanish don’t know that, however, and so, as they mouth the strange word in the early days before it becomes reflex, it comes out a question, one often formed, it seems, in their own language: Kay-moh? QuÉmeau?

At the restaurant, quemo is an all-purpose warning: behind you, coming through, hot stuff, watch your back. There is no room for variation in this kitchen, where forty-five chefs and cooks and stagiaires and dishwashers from different countries are constantly moving, and so one word must carry the burden of many kinds of caution. If you listen closely, you’ll hear it in the background of the louder, more obvious din created by the Thermomix whirring and coconuts being cracked and orders being fired and marrow bones being sawed apart and the occasional plate crashing to the floor. It is always there, like a looped soundtrack, this steady chorus of quemos.

The cooks are supposed to say the word as they round the treacherous bend between the small kitchen and the main one or step through the portal that divides the hot stations from the cold—an alert on a blind curve. Some, however, repeat it as they pass through any crowded area of the kitchen, rhythmically announcing each step— “QUEmoQUEmoQUEmo”—so that the word becomes a mantra against accidental bumping and other calamities. Admittedly, this produces something of a boy-who-cried-wolf situation: how do you know when something really is hot? For that, the kitchen has spontaneously devised variations: quemo mucho for when a cook takes a hot pan from the flattop and turns around to empty its contents at his station—in other words, when something really is hot.

Except for when it isn’t. Aitor Zabala, the chef de partie of Cold Station, says, “Quemo mucho” as he takes a tray of Ponds, delicate glass bowls of ice that will become one of this year’s stellar dishes, and moves them from one freezer to another. In other words, he says “Quemo mucho” not when he is burning a lot but when he is freezing. The other variations are a little more reliable: quemo mĮximo is used for pots of boiling oil and other potentially disfiguring substances. And this being elBulli, at least twice a day comes the warning quemo nitro, as two of the cooks—protective goggles strapped to their heads, a cloud of smoke trailing behind them—haul a tank of liquid nitrogen back to the cold station.

Quemo has its personal variations as well. Katie Button never completely loses the querulous tone of the first day; for her, quemo will always be a question. Luke Jang puts the accent on the second syllable, which has the effect, like so much of what he does, of making his version seem faster, more efficient. For Luis Arrufat, quemo is a kind of personal manifesto, a bellowed I am here!, as if he were the lead in a musical who, having already walked onstage and puffed out his chest, still feels the need to signal that he is about to commence singing. The chefs de cuisine, Eduard Xatruch and Oriol Castro, get away with not saying it at all; it’s a sign of their authority that they can assume that any person with whom they might collide will say it first. When they do use the word, it carries a distinctly didactic tone, as if to say, “Remember? This is how you’re supposed to do it.” Ferran doesn’t have to say “Quemo” either, of course, but he often does, accompanying it with a swift flick of his hands, so that it takes on a meaning unique to him: Would you please get the hell out of my way?

The stagiaires learn another word today, too: oĶdo, or “heard.” Used the way an English speaker might say “roger,” oĶdo is an acknowledgment that you’ve heard what the speaker has said. At elBulli, “oĶdo” is what you say when you are chef de partie and the person expediting has just called an order that will come from your station—you’re acknowledging that you heard the request, and you’ve started working on it. But since oĶdo is a hierarchical signifier—you say it only to those above you—the stagiaires say the word a lot more than anyone else. After all, they are the ones doing the restaurant’s grunt work—cleaning schmutz from the rabbit ears that will be fried into something resembling potato chips, splitting open tuna spines to release the translucent blob of marrow, turning dozens of pieces of rhubarb into something resembling sea cucumbers.

When the stagiaires receive instruction or criticism (We need more ears. You call that a sea cucumber? That’s a fucking zucchini!), they are supposed to reply with “OĶdo”—I heard you, got it, I’m on it. Sometimes Ferran will make a suggestion to the group and then, like a mostly benevolent drill sergeant and his “I can’t HEAR you!,” will ask, “OĶdo, cocina?” On those occasions the stagiaires will respond in unison with their own robust “OĶdo!” But usually the word is uttered by an individual, with varying intonations of enthusiasm or resentment, to demonstrate that he understands what the next task is. For despite the fact that many of them have cooked in important restaurants around the globe—Tetsuya’s, noma, the French Laundry, Alain Ducasse—the thirty-two stagiaires in elBulli’s kitchen are now on the bottom rung of the most famous restaurant in the world. And on the bottom rung, there is always something else to do.

A table at elBulli is the holy grail of reservations for food lovers around the world, but a stage there is even more desirable for young, ambitious cooks. Each year, roughly three thousand apply for the privileged opportunity of passing six months as stagiaires—technically the word means “interns” or “apprentices,” but it translates metaphorically as “kitchen slaves”—at its stove tops. The high regard in which the restaurant is held, as well as the chance to receive instruction from AdriĄ and his chefs, explains why apprentices travel, at their own expense, from Seoul and Bologna and Los Angeles and Caracas to the tiny, overbuilt town of Roses on Spain’s Costa Brava. It is also why they agree to work fourteen hours at a stretch in exchange for one meal a day, a bed in an unattractive apartment, and exactly no pay. It is why they stand practically still for seven of those hours, their feet planted at the center counter, squeezing the germ from thousands of kernels of corn or trimming the slime off anemones. If they make it through the six months that elBulli is open, they are able to say that they have worked in the best restaurant in the world. Luca Balboni, one of 2009’s three Italian stagiaires, puts it like this: “A stage at elBulli is like a baptism. Without it, you’re not really a Christian.”

Yet it wasn’t that long ago that a stage in Spain would have been more like an excommunication. “It would be like saying you were going to go train in Turkey or someplace,” says chef Dan Barber of New York’s Blue Hill restaurant. “Interesting in an ethnographic way, but it would have meant you weren’t serious about cuisine.” Indeed, as late as the 1980s, Spanish food had almost no reputation at all; when expatriates such as Gerry Dawes and Janet Mendel began writing about it, they had to persuade skeptics that there was more to Spanish cuisine than paella and gazpacho. That Spain is now the most exciting and admired place to work for a serious student of cuisine is the result of the labor of dozens of innovative chefs and hundreds of exceptional producers. But in its origins, the phenomenon is almost entirely attributable to Ferran AdriĄ.

The stage is a remnant of Europe’s medieval guilds. In fact, it is older than restaurants themselves and in its traditional form more akin to the voluntary indenturing that a young man would undertake in order to learn to print books than anything you might see on Top Chef. These days, a formal apprenticeship is no longer mandatory for an ambitious chef, and the modern incarnation of the stage is most often an internship arranged by his culinary school—with all the abuse-avoiding oversight and regulation that implies. Or it can be an impromptu passage: a young cook asks to spend a week or a month in the kitchen of an established restaurant, doing the drudge work—peeling the potatoes, cleaning the snails, chopping the garlic—in exchange for the chance to learn from a chef he admires.

But at elBulli, the stage remains a formal training period, with a beginning and end that coincide more or less exactly with the six months that the restaurant is open. Prospective stagiaires send in their applications a year in advance, so that a few months before the season begins, the restaurant has compiled a collection of cooks eager to indenture themselves. With only thirty-two slots to fill, the odds are against most of them. Those who do get in have Marc Cuspinera to thank.

For years, Marc was elBulli’s chef de cuisine, but these days he oversees an odd combination of administrative and design work for the restaurant. With his longish sideburns and gently ironic sense of humor, he could be running a retro record shop in Brooklyn selling vinyl records. Instead, he is in charge of a broad category of tasks at elBulli that include scheduling photo shoots of...

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1439175551
• ISBN 13: 9781439175552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 304