anthimeria

I am a bit of a food fiend.

I spent my childhood playing in an industrial kitchen (my parents are restaurant owners), and I have the burned finger-pads to prove it. I love to cook. I love to feed people. And I love to talk about food, and write and read about it, and watch cooking shows, and research food chemistry, and buy cookbooks and lust after Frank Bruni’s job (hey, a girl can dream).

As part of this, I have been obsessed with the mythology of elBulli and dining there since I’ve known of the restaurant. So much so, in fact, that I recently sat at Indigo Books with this in my lap, and read from cover to cover, all 632 pages. (With a small break, because a 632-page hardcover tome on my lap eventually made me lose all sensation in my thighs.) The book spells out with military precision a minute-by-minute story of a day in the restaurant’s operations. It’s fascinating, the typography is perfect, the photos immaculate, the layout thoughtful. A really great memoir, of sorts, only the protagonist is a restaurant.

elBulli is headed by one of the world’s few living geniuses, Chef Ferran Adrià, and sits on the Costa Brava in Catalonia, Spain. Adrià is lauded as a pioneer of ‘molecular gastronomy’, a frou-frou term that makes me cringe because it conveys a fussy, overly-wrought approach to cooking. Indeed, my heart is with simple techniques and good ingredients; a no-mess kind of style.

But I can’t help but be fascinated by Adrià’s intellectual approach to ingredients, from sourcing produce to plating his tiny edible masterpieces. He says that his food “demands psychological reflection”. I won’t do justice if I try here to delve into the 35-dish tasting menu each evening comprises, having only read about it. Lucky for me, Clotilde has done a great job documenting (and photographing!) the affair, having visited elBulli back in 2006, and sweetly recounts being “whisked away on a flying carpet driven by a mad scientist”.

And this is where I am torn. Part of elBulli’s mythology is that only 8000 spots a year are reserved from over 2 million reservation requests. It’s a lottery worth a shot, in my books. I want to send that email this October, that small chance at getting a table, and put some of my savings to good use in 2010. 

At the same time, it’s a bit of a hard sell. I’ve tried it with some close friends: “Would you be up to flying to Spain at a moment’s-notice, all to experience a once-in-a-lifetime dinner, but it’s kind of a crap-shoot as to when it might happen, and the bill will be hefty?” It’s a no-brainer to me, but um, also a bit unreasonable, I guess.

All this to say: if you’re willing to be my gastronomical companion, throw caution to the wind, and take a stab in the dark at dining on a bluff in Catalonia in 2010, let me know sometime before October 15, 2009. I’ll make reservations.