El Bulli for you: Ferran Adrià and the Art of Food at Somerset House
El Bulli exhibition at Somerset House. Image: Matthew Lloyd/Somerset House
“Academics have been relatively slow to study the subject of cooking. It is often taken for granted.”
So says Gwyn Miles, director of Somerset House, which is trying to give cooking a proper re-examination via a major retrospective of what was, until recently, the world’s best restaurant – Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, in Roses, Catalonia.
Ferran Adrià and the Art of Food is a thorough – some might say, geekily thorough – examination of the philosophy, science and culinary genius behind El Bulli, which closed its doors on 30 July 2011.
In the exhibition’s detailed history of the El Bulli restaurant, it’s fascinating to learn it was set up by a homeopathic doctor from Dusseldorf, who originally ran it as a mini-golf course and beach bar in the early 60s. From such humble beginnings, it evolved into a noted haute cuisine venue, before – under the guidance of Adrià from the mid-80s onwards – transforming into an avant-garde food mecca. In the process, it won the title of best restaurant in the world five times.
El Bulli clearly had – and still has – a strong sense of its own importance. What else are we to make of a restaurant that, in 1999, retroactively catalogued all its original recipes from 1987 onwards – starting at recipe number 1, and ending on number 1,846 in 2011?
Among the mixed bag of displays is a short video of the final service at the restaurant, which has since graduated to a sort of ghostly kitchen afterlife as the ‘El Bulli Foundation’ – “set to be one of the stellar knowledge spaces in a new paradigm of cooking”, according to the programme. The Foundation will be part cooking academy, part food thinktank, with an exhibition centre due to open in 2014. Sounds like a nice way for Ferran Adrià to continue cooking without having pesky customers underfoot. Its slogan is: “no reservations, no routines, no timetables”. (But will they do patatas bravas?)
Somerset House deserves a pat on the back for creating “galleries to display the unusual, the unexpected, and the sometimes neglected”. Plenty of people would say great food can be great art (my only caveats would be: unlike music, literature or fine arts, food is so transitory, and unrepeatable. You have to be a particular type of person to remember in detail a fantastic meal you had in 1991. Plus, unlike those other ‘art forms’, food alone is 100% essential to the functioning of your body).
Either way , there’s no doubting in the form Ferran Adrià, you have a bona fide maestro. Though if his work is art, presumably the best way to appreciate it would be to eat it. It depends on the individual how much they will get from an exhibition about a restaurant that – in all likelihood – they have never visited, and now never will.
Ferran Adrià and the Art of Food runs at Somerset House until 29 September. Admission is £10.
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San Juan Festival in Spain: Beaches and Bonfires
San Juan fiesta, Valencia. Image credit: To Uncertainty and Beyond
It’s the longest day, the shortest night and, in Spain at least, a chance to celebrate the festival of San Juan.
The date of this summer solstice festival varies a little each year, but it usually falls between the 20th and 24th June; this year it takes place on the 23rd, the day before Saint John the Baptist’s day.
The three symbols of this deeply pagan event (ah, those pagans — they knew how to party) are herbs, water and fire — all purifying elements that make up San Juan’s heady symbolism of fertility, vitality and astral gods.
San Juan is celebrated slightly differently depending on which part of Spain you’re in, although it’s particularly fervent in Catalan-influenced regions.
Menorca has one of the most famous San Juan festivals, which climaxes in the jaleo, a performance involving horses, while onlookers down pomada, a mix of gin and lemonade.
Bonfire at San Juan. Image credit: Cruccone
In Barcelona, the Verbenas de Sant Joan, or Nit de Sant Joan, is marked with fireworks and bonfires. Likewise, in Valencia, partygoers flock to the beach, where they mark the turn of the year by jumping over bonfires on the sand.
According to who you ask, you must leap over the flames once or three times or seven times for luck.
Unlike other festivals in Spain — Holy Week, Las Fallas or Moros y Cristianos — San Juan is less about costumes, finery and organised events than it is about meeting friends and having a drink — into the very small hours.
From the perspective of a particularly rainy London summer, a dose of fireworks, booze and beaches seems especially alluring.
“Fred per Nadal i calor per Sant Joan, salut per tot l’any” – Cold for Christmas, warm for Sant Joan, health for the whole year!
(If you want to get into the spirit of San Juan from afar, the Barcelona city website offers its recipe for coca, a traditional Catalan flan eaten around this time.)
Images: To Uncertainty and Beyond, Cruccone
Invisible Catalan Cinema Season starts at the BFI
The BFI is about to kick off a short season of radical, underground Catalan films distributed in Spain during the last years of Franco’s reign.
Clandestí: Invisible Catalan Cinema Under Franco focuses on films by a generation of filmmakers who grew up after the Civil War. Many of the films featured have no credits to protect the identities of the filmmakers.
From the BFI blurb:
While this body of work represents a margin of Spanish film history, it nevertheless contains some of the most crucial, first-hand documents of the end of Franco’s dictatorship, revealing problems of housing and social services, immigration, the fate of political prisoners, and restrictions on expression and free speech.
The season runs from 25 – 30 November and follows on the heels of the South American film season at the BFI in August.
The BFI also showed a fistful of Spanish-language films at the London Film Festival this year.
Also showing as part of the season are two episodes from the award-winning documentary series Cronica d’una Mirada, which tells the story of clandestine filmmakers in Franco’s Spain between 1960 and 1975.
Catalonia Bans Bullfighting
A notable day for Spain or a long-overdue and rather token gesture?
This blog is, of course, London-based, but I feel Catalonia’s decision to abolish bullfighting can’t go without a mention. It’s the most eye-catching story to come out of Spain since, well, that football trophy they won recently.
The Catalan parliament has voted to outlaw the practice by 68 votes to 55, with nine abstentions. Catalonia is the first region of mainland Spain to ban the sport, effective from the beginning of 2012.
Catalan president José Montilla, who voted against the motion, has stated his hope that the decision won’t lead to further conflict between the region and the rest of Spain. A nice sentiment, that.
The Guardian, meanwhile, makes the salient point that Catalonia only has one functioning bullring (in Barcelona), which stages around 15 fights a year. So the vote’s practical effects may be rather limited. Nonetheless, it seems like a massive step on the road towards seeing the sport banned nationwide.
I’ve seen bullfights on TV but I’ve never attended one. I wouldn’t be averse to the idea, though I don’t imagine I’d like it. Whether it is banned or not – and I suspect there are plenty of traditionalists who would rally around the cause to keep it – there’s no doubt that bullfighting will always be part of the national image of Spain. Like the Routemasters that no longer trundle around London, or the bowler hats that people no longer wear, old icons die hard.
Vida London 