Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Ferran shuttled between our table and his capos—the white-shirted generals running the kitchen—as an unceasing drift of guests came back to meet him. There was a famous wine critic who produced a rare Japanese spice. Some fabulously rich people shook Ferran’s hand and gushed, “You don’t see this every day,” and Ferran said, “No, this is every day.” A photographer from a Danish magazine, a tanned woman with very blond hair and long legs, wearing a sheer pinafore and a light-blue bikini underneath, climbed onto a table and started taking photographs. And for a second, everything stopped, sighed … then resumed in double time.

  “Where the hell are the tapiocas?” a capo yelled at the hunched-over chefs on the line. “We’re going to get punished here. Let’s go!”

  It was hard not to feel ridiculous, supping on delicacies while people worked at breakneck speed to get them to us. But we didn’t overanalyze this because the main dishes, fourteen in all, began to arrive. And each dish was … was … how to explain it?

  In Ferran Adrià’s restaurant, nothing is for certain once his food crosses the Maginot Line of your mouth. He feeds you things you never thought existed, let alone things you’d think to eat: a gelatin with rare mollusks trapped inside (it was so odd, the cool, sweet jelly parting for salty pieces of the sea, that it tasted primordial and transcendent at once), tagliatelle carbonara (chicken consommé solidified and cut into thin, coppery, pastalike strands that, once glistening on the tongue, dissolved back into consommé that poured down the throat), cuttlefish ravioli (the cuttlefish sliced with a microtome, then injected with coconut milk, another sweet explosion that seemed to wrap the fish in a new sea), rosemary lamb (we were told to raise sprigs of rosemary to our noses as we munched on the lamb, both of us now with rosemary mustaches, the smell of rosemary becoming the lamb as if the two were the same)… and it went on like this.

  I will tell you: We were happy. We were served an eighty-year-old vinegar pooled in an apple gelatin with ginger, and vinegar has never tasted so gentle, so perfectly between sweet and sour, with a trace of gin, so unlike vinegar that it redefined vinegar. I would drink that vinegar every day, if I could, to start every day with a little pucker and smile. There was dessert, too … a first dessert and a second dessert and then more snacks. At the end, when we went to him, Ferran waved us off, saying, “Today you eat, tomorrow we’ll think.”

  And so Carlos and I drove back down to Roses and the hotel. The clouds appeared as purple-lit dirigibles, and more light beamed across the sea. When we returned to the hotel and took a swim (the sea tasting like something made by Ferran Adrià) and sat down for some sangria on the terrace, when I tried later to describe the meal to Sara, I couldn’t find any words. There were no words that came to mind. But I tried.

  I tried to describe one dish in particular, an amazing, complicated thing, really. It was monkfish liver served as a pâté and, floating on top of it, a froth of soy foam. On the plate, in orbit around this foie-soy structure, were quasars of orange, lemon, grapefruit, and, finally, what stopped me, what I startled at, tomato hearts. They were just the guts of the tomato, really, its oozing seeds and essence.

  What I meant to tell my wife, but couldn’t, was that when I ate the substance of liver and foam with some grapefruit and then scooped the heart, naked and dripping, into my mouth, I’d felt, in all my happiness and weird heady lightness, something else, too: an undercurrent of impermanence, some creeping feeling of danger and fear. All of it in this single bite that slid down my throat. I might have grimaced as I swallowed it; I might not have. But when I looked up, I met the gaze of Ferran Adrià, who stood across the kitchen, watching, and I wondered whether he thought I didn’t like what I was eating. Or whether he knew exactly what I felt, had searched for that expression on my face, because he knew what it was to eat a heart, and he’d felt it, too.

  6. [ON THE AHISTORICAL CONUNDRUM OF THE GREAT FERRAN ADRIÀ]

  It’s as likely that he’d have ended up a car mechanic as a chef, if not for the pleasure of beer. After quitting high school and moving to Ibiza with the full intention of living the party life, Ferran took a job washing dishes to pay for his cervezas. Up until that moment, he had subsisted on beefsteak and french fries. That’s all he ate—and that’s all he wanted to eat.

  But working in restaurants, he slowly indoctrinated himself into a multifarious world of taste, its bombast and truths. And by the time Ferran left Ibiza at twenty, he had decided: He would learn everything he could about cuisine, and through cuisine he would know everything about the world. He read Escoffier and Larousse. He made the recipes of dead chefs with zealous devotion. He had a friend who was working up the coast from Barcelona at El Bulli, a two-star restaurant with a loyal if somewhat limited clientele, and in 1983, he hitched three hours north with the thought of picking up some quick money. Eighteen years later, he’s still here.

  Ferran is thirty-nine now and no more than five foot five in black-stockinged feet. He has a hairless chest with no muscles, exactly, and a bulging belly. (This vision appeared to me one day when he changed into his chef’s whites without thought of anyone else in the room.) He does, in fact, possess almost nothing of his own. He never cooks for himself or friends and always eats out, usually traveling the world two or three times a year to eat, except for Christmas Day, when he cooks with his brother for their parents at home. Though he could buy them a Mercedes, and would, they don’t want one. It would change the context of their lives, he says, and they’re happy with their lives.

  In the kitchen, Ferran Adrià is demanding, withering, Napoleonic. His dissatisfaction may manifest itself like an unexpected thunderstorm. But he’s almost preternatural to watch, like Picasso captured on film, changing a strawberry to a rooster to a woman in a few brushstrokes.

  Even now he dreams of a day when a restaurant will be less a museum (serving the same, same, same) than an experiment (serving the new), when a computer screen will bring the revolution into all of our homes, Ferran greeting us after work with a fifteen-minute recipe for his chicken curry, a succulent, deconstructed confusion of solid curry and liquid chicken that turns chicken curry on its head.

  And yet, it’s odd: For being one of the most self-actualized men I’ve met, he is also one of the most ahistorical. When I ask him to describe the best meal he’s ever eaten, he says he erases his memories so he doesn’t live for a moment he can never bring back. When I ask about his grandparents, he can recall nothing about them. “I think my grandfather died in the Spanish Civil War,” he said. “Ten times—ten times I’ve been told, and ten times I’ve forgotten. Since I didn’t know him, it’s as if he never existed.” When I suggest that it’s a bit strange not to know the first thing about your grandfather but then to be able to quote a recipe by Escoffier from 1907, he says, “Not at all. My life is kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. History doesn’t interest me, the kitchen does.”

  Politics? “I’m in the center. It doesn’t play into my life.”

  Religion? “Do I pray when someone’s sick? Yes. Otherwise, no.”

  Hobbies? “Hobbies?”

  Mentors? “I came as a virgin to the kitchen.”

  When I ask if it troubles him when people don’t understand the invention and game of his cuisine, he says, “Some people come here and see God; a few come and see the devil. The truth is relative.”

  The truth is relative? “I mean that only the tongue tells the truth. History doesn’t tell it, religion doesn’t. All that concerns me really is what the food tastes like. I am the chef, so I have to ask: Does it amaze me? Is there a before and after? If there is, then good. Let’s eat.”

  7. [ON TASTE]

  “The difference between a grand chef and a magical chef,” Ferran said as we whizzed down the mountain, “is that a magical chef knows not just what he’s eating, but how to eat.”

  “And how does a magical chef eat?” Carlos asked. Ferran’s eyebrows rose at that, and an “Ahh” passed his lips. Then he grinned and said, “You are about to see.” />
  We had asked Ferran to pick his favorite place for lunch in Roses. He had us park and led us down an alley that spilled into another alley that opened onto a walking street outside a place called Rafa’s. The restaurant, named after its owner, was a simple, traditional, open-air seafood grill with wooden tables. And Rafa himself seemed plainly hungover. While we sat, he disappeared into the back, then reappeared with a red bandanna that he wrapped deliberately around his head, ears jutting out. And once he’d knotted it, he was suddenly transformed. “Okay,” he said in a gruff voice. “Okay.” Samurai Rafa.

  “There’s nothing like this place,” said Ferran, pleased. When the waitress read the day’s menu, when she was through reciting twenty or so items, Ferran looked at her and simply said, “Yes,” and then clarified, “Yes, all of it. A little bit of all of it. And whatever else the chef has.” She looked over her shoulder at Rafa, who nodded slightly and winked. And then the dishes came, each plato reflecting the way food has been served in Catalonia for hundreds of years. Tomatoes slathered on peasant bread. Sliced prosciutto on a plate. Succulent anchovies, lightly peppered, in olive oil. A small mountain of tallarines, tiny, buttery clams that we pried from their shells with our tongues, the empty shells piling like fantastic, ancient currency.

  With each dish, Ferran distinguished himself, for the act of eating was a full-on, full-contact orgy. His mouth, with its thin, quick lips and athletic tongue, worked frenetically. And at times, he didn’t just eat the food, he wore it. He took the fresh prosciutto, fine, bright prosciutto that smelled like … well, like sex … and rubbed it on his upper lip (the same as sniffing wine, he said, or eating lamb with a sprig of rosemary beneath your nose). His fingers were soon bathed in olive oil and flecked with pepper, dancing quickly from plate to plate, so quickly, in fact, that our own fingers began to dance for fear that the food would vanish.

  Platos came and went. Crustaceans arrived, various shades of orange, pink, and purple, just scooped from boiling water, with waggling antennae. Ferran picked up a prawn, one about the length of his hand, that looked like a shrunk-down lobster. Its shell was covered on the outside with small white eggs (a prawn that I would have studiously avoided altogether), and he began to lick the eggs with such ferocity that I decided I must have been missing something important and went digging for an eggs-on-shell prawn myself.

  While I don’t consider myself a delicate eater, next to Ferran I felt effete as hell. Particle by particle, cell by cell, he imbibed and inhaled and ingested until particle by particle and cell by cell he seemed changed by the food itself. Even when he sipped his cold beer, it was as if he were gulping from a chalice, washing everything clean. Now he held his prawn before me, its creepy black eyes staring into mine, and asked what it looked like. Face-to-face with the prawn, I was speechless. “It’s intimidating, it’s scary, it’s prehistoric,” Ferran said for me. “But in this context, it’s normal. For generations, we’ve been eating prawns. If tomorrow someone puts a spider on the plate, then everyone’s going to say it’s crazy. But I don’t see the difference. For you to understand what the ocean is, you have to understand something that Americans would think is crazy. You have to suck this …”

  He suddenly tore the head of the prawn from its carapace and held it in the space between us. “You mean the head?” I said, stating the obvious, stalling for time, processing a simple thought: I don’t think I want to eat the head. It doesn’t seem like something I want to eat.

  “Yes, the head,” said Ferran. “If I can describe in one word the taste of the sea, it’s sucking the head of this prawn. At home, my parents sucked the head. I tasted it and comprehended it. Just suck it.”

  He took the head, put the open end to his lips, and crushed the shell until everything in it (brain and viscera, bits of meat and shell) had been expelled into his mouth, caramel-colored liquid dribbling down his chin. He savored it for a long moment, his eyes closed, and he seemed to have reached some kind of ecstasy. When he opened his eyes, it was my turn. I started tentatively, but there was no tentative way to crush a prawn head and suck it dry, so I just began crushing and slurping, juice running down my chin now. It was a profound and powerful taste, oddly sublime; the essence of this thing was, yes, salty, but also deeply evolved. It was cognac and candy, bitter and sweet, plankton and fruit. It seemed like the whole chemical history of the world in one bite.

  “This is taste,” said Ferran. “Not the taste, it is taste. You can’t explain this.”

  He went on. “In a restaurant like this, we can eat the head. Spanish people find it provocative. They have an affection for it,” he said. “At El Bulli, no, people are not prepared to eat the head. Ninety-nine percent of the people won’t eat the head. It’s not permitted in high cuisine.” He took another prawn in his hand, pulled off the head, and crushed it. This time the caramel-colored liquid pooled on the plate before him.

  “But if I pour this over food in my kitchen, I’ve changed the context. I can do this and people will eat it. People will eat it and taste the Mediterranean. This is what I look for. This is what I search for. This potency. Double the potency. The depths of the sea …” He sat back for a moment, considered. Then he reflexively leaned forward, swiped a finger through the puddle of prawn nectar, brought it to his mouth, and licked it.

  “Mágico,” he said.

  8. [APHORISMS FROM THE PROFESSOR, SEQUEL]

  In the kitchen, scribbling in a notebook marked SISTEMA CREATIVO: “Anarchy is fine but only after logic.”

  Before we said goodbye one night: “There’s more emotion, more feeling, in a piece of ruby-red grapefruit with a little sprinkle of salt on it than in a big piece of fish.”

  To me, spoken conspiratorially: “The perfect meal: Have a reservation so that you can look forward to being there. In a secluded place, where there’s a certain magic in arriving. Four people, everyone on a level playing field gastronomically. There shouldn’t be a leader. Equals. When the food starts coming, concentrate on the dish, then speak about the dish. You have to laugh a lot. For me, it would be better to go with my partner because I like to have a woman by my side.”

  At the end: “Until I can serve an empty white plate on a white tablecloth, there’s a lot to be done.”

  9. [ON MEXICO]

  During my August sojourn at El Bulli, Ferran invited me to return to Barcelona in the winter to watch him, his brother, and a third young chef, Oriol, at the workshop, where during their off months they like to experiment wildly. The workshop is located in a very old building in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona just off the Ramblas, which, when I arrived, was brightly lit with Christmas lights. I climbed a worn stone staircase that led through an enormous set of carved wooden doors, and then the workshop appeared like a modernist’s dream: a cool, high-ceilinged space with pine floorboards and white walls and Omani rugs. Upstairs, a library houses hundreds of cookbooks, as well as everything—shelf after shelf—that’s been written by or about Ferran Adrià.

  From a balcony on the second floor, it’s possible to look down on the kitchen as if from a luxury box, witnessing the consternations and elations of Albert, Oriol, and Ferran. Albert is a fairer, younger version of his brother, and Oriol, at twenty-seven, is simply a madman, according to Ferran. On this morning, Oriol had just returned from the market while Albert was in hand-to-hand combat with a food processor known as the Pacojet.

  It was this device that broke one day in the kitchen at El Bulli, prompting Ferran to see what would happen if they ran frozen chocolate in it, broken. From that came something called “chocolate dust,” very fine dust devils of chocolate—a kind of vanishing chocolate, something between solid and air—that Ferran seized upon as a wholly new substance.

  Now the group was working on about thirty things at once, among them “basil cylinders” (flavored ice frozen in the shape of a perfect emerald cylinder, to be filled with a yet-undetermined ice cream, perhaps Parmesan), something called “sponge ham” (a complete mystery to everyone), a
nd a bowl of foie gras and apple foam, into which the diner would pour a broth, disintegrating everything to a soup for which they were also seeking a third and fourth ingredient.

  “We’re going to be much more interactive this year,” said Ferran. He showed me a morsel of grilled chicken on a white plate and then seven spice holders (marked MEXICO, INDIA, JAPAN, MOROCCO, et cetera). “With this dish, you decide the end of the film,” he said. “We give you the chicken, and you decide the spice.” Oriol and Albert had already spent much time trying to refine each of the spice mixtures, making sure that a full octave of taste was present in each, the best curry from India or wasabi from Japan, and that each complemented the rest.

  Now it was time for Ferran to try. Oriol and Albert crowded around him as he approached the plate, staring solemnly at the nugget of chicken. He picked up the container marked MEXICO and shook a bit on his finger, then sampled it. He said nothing. Then he shook it over the chicken, the specks raining down in a red shower, and then he grabbed another shaker and shook it, too.

  “Look out, uncle, that’s salt!” said Albert, appearing stricken.

  “Don’t get dizzy here, I know,” said Ferran, concentrating. He popped the chicken into his mouth and chewed. He stared into the middle distance. His eyebrows rose and fell as if registering a series of gustatory sensations. He considered it for a long time, then after a while longer, he shook his head emphatically … No. “It’s not Mexico,” he said.

  Albert looked flabbergasted. “For me, it is!”

  “It’s not. You taste tomato, cilantro, but it’s not Mexico.”

  “It’s my Mexico,” said his brother.

  “It needs more, but I won’t call that Mexico.”

  Both brothers glared at the plate, at the specks of red spice left on the white porcelain. Disappointment lingered for a moment, then suddenly it was converted to forward motion again. Ferran cocked his head, then Albert did, too, noticing his brother’s shifting mood.