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FOOD AND DRINK

‘World’s best restaurant’ to reopen in Spain as museum

Spain's elBulli, repeatedly voted the world's best restaurant before it closed over a decade ago, is set to reopen as a museum dedicated to the culinary revolution it sparked.

Published: 7 June 2023 09:50 CEST
'World's best restaurant' to reopen in Spain as museum
Spanish chef Ferran Adrià poses in the former kitchen of the El Bulli. Photo: LLUIS GENE / AFP

Nestled in an isolated cove on Spain’s northeastern tip, the museum is dubbed “elBulli1846” – a reference to the 1,846 dishes ground-breaking chef Ferran Adrià says were developed at the eatery.

“It’s not about coming here to eat, but to understand what happened in elBulli,” the 61-year-old told AFP near the kitchen of the restaurant he ran for over two decades.

The museum will open on June 15th, nearly 12 years after the restaurant served its final dish to the public.

Visitors will be able to see hundreds of photos, notebooks, trophies and models made of plastic or wax that emulate some of the innovative dishes which were served at the eatery.

Adrià pioneered the culinary trend known as molecular gastronomy, which deconstructs ingredients and recombines them in unexpected ways.

READ ALSO: Ten reasons your homemade Spanish tortilla went wrong

The results are foods with surprising combinations and textures, such as fruit foams, gazpacho popsicles and caramelised quails.

Under Adrià’s watch, elBulli achieved the coveted Michelin three-star status and was rated the world’s best restaurant a record five times by British magazine The Restaurant.

“What we did here was find the limits of what can be done in a gastronomic experience,” Adrià said.

“What are the physical, mental and even spiritual limits that humans have. And that search paved paths for others.”

‘Passion for cuisine’

Some of the world’s most famous chefs were trained by Adrià at elBulli, including Denmark’s René Redzepi of Noma and Italy’s Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana.

A foundation set up to maintain elBulli’s legacy invested €11 million in the museum.

Plans to expand the building on the idyllic Cala Montjoi cove near the towns of Roses had to be adjusted after they ran into opposition from environmentalists.

El Bulli is to be turned into a museum. Photo: LLUIS GENE / AFP

Adria headed to the white-walled restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean in 1983 for a one-month internship on the recommendation of a friend.

He was invited to join the restaurant’s staff as a line cook the following year and became its solo head chef in 1987.

READ ALSO – El Esmorzaret: What is Valencia’s sacred snack tradition?

Adrià bought the restaurant in 1990 with his business partner Juli Soler, who passed away in 2015.

“The most important thing that happened to me at elBulli is that I discovered for the first time passion for cuisine,” he said.

“At the table, when the staff ate together, we did not talk about football, or our weekends, we talked about cuisine.”

‘Right to close’

The restaurant opened usually just six months of the year to give Adrià and his staff time to conceive new dishes.

The meal consisted of a set menu comprising dozens of small dishes which cost around €325, including a drink, when the restaurant closed in 2011.

A team of 70 people prepared the meals for the 50 guests who managed to get a reservation.

Adria said he accepted that his culinary innovations did not please everyone.

“In the end, they are new things and it’s a shock after the other, it is normal that it makes you reflect on what you like,” he said.

READ ALSO: What are the rules for setting up a food truck in Spain? 

In the final years of the restaurant, demand for reservations was so high that Adrià allocated seats mostly through a lottery.

When Adrià decided to close the restaurant, he justified the move saying it “had become a monster”.

“I was very certain that we were right to close. We had reached what we felt was a satisfactory experience at the maximum level,” Adrià told AFP.

“And once we reached it we said ‘why do we have to continue?’. The mission of elBulli was not this, it was finding the limits,” he added.

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CULTURE

Spain’s flamenco dress, an Andalusian classic evolving with fashion

Luis Fernández's workshop in Seville's Old City is buzzing with customers who have come to try on his dazzling array of flamenco dresses, their vibrant fabrics replete with voluptuous ruffles and polka dots.

Published: 19 April 2024 10:03 CEST
Spain's flamenco dress, an Andalusian classic evolving with fashion

Flamenco fashion hits its annual peak in springtime when towns and cities across Spain’s southern Andalusia region hold their annual week-long ferias, when everyone puts on their finery to go out and eat, drink and dance into the small hours.

One customer is Virginia Cuaresma. Under the watchful eye of the designer, pins at the ready to make any necessary adjustment, she stands before the mirror in a traditional midnight blue gown, ruffles adorning the skirt and the sleeves.

Then she tries one in aquamarine, twinned with an embroidered fringed shawl in the same colour. Then a more modern styled red dress, which leaves a lot of skin on show.

“Right now, everything is in chaos, we’re up to our eyes… these are the last few fittings” before the clients return to collect their gowns “and enjoy the feria,” Fernández told AFP, referring to this southern city’s prestigious fair which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors and this year runs from April 14th to 20th.

The most traditional design, which dates back more than 100 years, is a floor-length dress which is closely fitted to the thigh, fishtailing out in a ruffled skirt and matching ruffles on the sleeves.

READ ALSO: ¡Olé! Five things you didn’t know about Spain’s flamenco art form

To complement the dress, women accessorise, wearing a fringed shawl round the shoulders, earrings and bracelets, their hair pulled up in a bun and pinned with a comb with a single flower in an ensemble that has become the image of Andalusia and even used abroad as a symbol of Spain.

“The flamenco dress brings out what’s most beautiful in a woman,” explains Fernández, pointing to the wide neckline and “hourglass silhouette” which highlights the contrast between the narrow waist and the hips and bust, in a style that’s “very flattering” and makes the wearer look “beautiful”.

“When I chose a dress to go to the feria, I look for something that will enhance my female figure, says Cuaresma, a 34-year-old geographer with a dark complexion and long dark hair.

For her, dressing up for the feria is a way of “carrying on Andalusian traditions” and connecting with her late grandmother Virginia, who used to sew flamenco dresses when she was a child.

Luis Fernández’s workshop in Seville’s Old City is buzzing with customers who have come to try on his dazzling array of flamenco dresses. (Photo by CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP)

A style evolution

A Seville native who grew up loving the fair, Fernández started working as a designer in 2012 alongside fellow couturier Manuel Jurado, and from the start he knew he wanted to make flamenco dresses.

For him, it is a unique regional costume “that evolves with fashion and the only one which incorporates new trends,” he says with pride.

The garment has its roots in so-called “majo” costumes “worn by working class people” in Spain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and often captured in the paintings of Spanish master Goya, explained anthropologist Rosa María Martínez Moreno, who wrote a book called “El Traje de Flamenca (“The Flamenco Dress”).

With the start of the Seville fairs in the middle of the 19th century, the style began to be adopted by the wealthy classes at a time when there was a pushback against all things French, including its aristocratic fashions.

READ ALSO: A guide to Seville’s Feria de Abril in 2024

Thrown into the mix was the dress of the gypsy women who sold doughnuts at the fair and who wore dresses and skirts adorned with ruffles.

By the 20th century, the flamenco dress had evolved into its current form and become popular, thanks largely to the growth of flamenco as an art form and the expansion of schools teaching this Andalusian dance form, which women often learn to perform at the fairs, Martinez Moreno said.

Springtime is their heyday as towns and cities across the southern Andalusia region hold their annual ferias. (Photo by CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP)

Image of Spain

During the 1960s, the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco set out to “sell Spain as a tourist attraction” and to do so used “popular stereotypes” such as the flamenco dress which “began to be recognised as the image of Spanishness” abroad, she adds.

READ ALSO: How Spain became a cheap mass tourism destination

In recent years Andalusian dress has inspired big name designers such as Christian Dior, who in 2022 showcased a new collection in Seville’s iconic Plaza de España.

Fernández says the sector in Seville has become more professional with designers who follow “the trends from Paris and Milan”, and who have since 1995 staged a yearly international flamenco fashion show in the city.

An outfit from an atelier like the one Fernández runs can range from several hundred euros to over one thousand.

But there are cheaper options today in an era where fashion has become more accessible.

That is a relief for women like Cuaresma, who says she usually buys “at least” one flamenco dress each year because for the fair, or at least the opening day, “we don’t like to repeat” the same outfit worn in previous years.

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