elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food, Somerset House - exhibition review
Towards the end of this show, we see the late artist Richard Hamilton, a regular visitor to elBulli, Ferran Adrià's former restaurant in a beautiful Catalonian bay, compare Adrià's achievements in cooking to Marcel Duchamp's and Shakespeare's in that he pioneered a radical, conceptual approach to cooking and invented a fresh vocabulary and syntax for food.
Set in the form of a detailed timeline, the exhibition explains how Adrià and elBulli became a phenomenon. It’s a compelling story, starting with archival material about its journey from a minigolf course to a Michelin-starred restaurant even before Adrià joined in 1984. But under his tenure it exploded with creativity — it created a wealth of extraordinary concoctions (exactly 1,846 dishes) such as The Seeds, an elegant fusion of fruit and vegetable seeds and intense infusions.
He and his team minutely documented their efforts with everything from workshop sketchbooks and photos and videos of the dishes to clay models of the portion sizes and shapes, so Adrià’s desire for boundary-breaking and creating an all-consuming sensory experience through his foams, nitro-balloons and frozen dust is energetically brought to life. But the show has a torturous flaw: we never get close to tasting it. As an experience it remains tantalisingly incomplete.
Until September 29 (020 7845 4600, somersethouse.org.uk)
