Ferran by Colman Andrews

Ferran by Colman Andrews

Author:Colman Andrews [Andrews, Colman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101545942
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-28T16:00:00+00:00


The tomfoolery of the early eighties had lasted well into the nineties at El Bulli. By all accounts, the kitchen team of this period was a bunch of good-looking, energetic, fun-loving young men (and an occasional woman, like Montse Núñez, known as “the aunt,” who cooked at the restaurant from 1991 to 2000), not making much money but doing good work and having a great time. Photographs from the era—there are a number of them on the El Bulli Web site—tell the tale: In 1991, Xavier Sagristà and another El Bulli chef, Marc Cuspinera, were shot in the kitchen holding bloody pigs’ ears up to their heads. The year after that, the whole crew posed sporting copper cloches as hats; the caption reads, in the English translation on the El Bulli Web site, “Although it seems the opposite, we were not all the day joking.” Obviously they weren’t, or they wouldn’t have been able to put such good food out on the tables—but, at least judging from a progression of photographs from year to year, there was a spirit of camaraderie and fun that slowly faded as the staff grew and the stakes got higher.

At some point as he evolved from merely an extremely talented Spanish-influenced French-style chef into the most original culinary innovator of our time, Ferran must have begun to feel a little like a Prince Hal with a kitchen full of Falstaffs. He had partied as hard as anyone—he got into this whole cooking thing in the first place, remember, so that he could spend a decadent summer in Ibiza—and at the height of what I like to think of as the disco-beach era, he was as well-known in the bars and clubs of Roses and vicinity as any of his cooks, staying up as late, drinking as much, and chasing as many girls as anyone. But things changed, and so did he.

Jeff Cerciello, who was a stagiare at El Bulli in 1993 (and later became culinary director of Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, Bouchon Bakery, and ad hoc restaurants), remembers that even back then, when Albert and the rest of the kitchen crew would arrive at the restaurant at sunup, having come straight from the delights of Roses, “Ferran would always be there waiting, and sometimes he’d flip out when we’d come in all disheveled, wearing jeans and our jackets from the night before.” But, adds Cerciello, “When it came time to cook, everybody was suddenly very focused. Everybody was just so into what we were doing. I’ve never experienced anything like that since.” El Bulli in this era was, Ferran has said, a mixture of Bohemia and military discipline.

In the mid-nineties, in any case, photographs of the kitchen staff start getting more serious, less colorful, eventually becoming positively sober. Chef’s whites and blue aprons replace T-shirts and jeans. Eccentric haircuts disappear. A shot from 2001 of the stagiares throwing their kitchen towels up into the air—a closing-night ritual at the restaurant—shows a neatly dressed group standing evenly



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