The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  He called for paper and pen from one of his countless earnest, eager apprentices, and began to draw floridly and actively, making swooping charts of the history of cuisine, filled with Venn-diagram-like circles enclosing famous names and long arcs and arrows connecting one significant moment with the next. He drew as he talked—I realized that he was the inventor of the Barcelona diagram—and soon turned to sketching boxes and vectors on a large sheet of white paper.

  “Carême, you see, was a pastry chef,” he said. “Everybody thinks of him as a cook, but he was actually a pastry chef. Sugar?” He took two for his coffee. “He was the best pastry chef in France. Now, come to our own time, who’s the great innovator?” Dramatic pause. “Michel Guérard!” He trumped with the name of the chef best known as a father of nouvelle cuisine, in the 1970s. “And he was a pastry chef, too. Very interesting that two revolutionaries have been pastry chefs. Whatever they’ve tried to do, they’ve tried this symbiosis of the savory world and the sweet. Escoffier, more than being a cook, was a codifier. I don’t know why it played out this way, but it did. Since then, Gaston Lenôtre and Pierre Hermé. And, after that, nothing, really. It’s been consolidated, but nothing very new came out of it in France. Why did Michel Guérard begin this revolution? Because he was a pastry chef, and the pastry chef was the second-class citizen of the kitchen. He did it to show ‘I am a cook.’ It’s the thinking of a pastry chef that initiated the revolution of nouvelle cuisine!” He looked at me keenly, to see if I was following.

  He was, in truth, speaking so quickly, and mentioning so many names and concepts, that I was a bit confused by the argument—until I looked down at the paper where he had been drawing the complex flowchart of French dessert-making. The point it conveyed was simple: there had really been just two hinge points in French cooking—Carême’s early-nineteenth-century revolution, and Michel Guérard’s twentieth-century one—and both had come from pastry cooks escaping the limits of pastry. Pastry-makers were natural magicians, and magic in cooking would always come from them.

  “So, now, here’s elBulli!” He drew some more. Then he called for one of the many illustrated books that document the ascension of elBulli, and flipped through its pages for examples. “We started taking things from the sweet world and moving them to the savory: a sorbet, or a savory ice cream,” he said. “One early savory ice cream was a Parmesan ice cream, in 1994. It extends an incredible dialogue between me and Albert. One of the important themes for us was about construction: how do you construct a dessert? This opened us up to the whole question of tiramisu—opened an incredible world to us. Deconstruction began here. Black Forest cake. This is mythical.”

  He also had a trait I’d noticed in other big artists, and that was the urge to emphasize, a little perversely, the mere pragmatic, working logic of what he’d done. (Back in the seventies in SoHo, Donald Judd and Carl Andre would always shrug and talk about materials found on Canal Street, as though you, too, would have thought of minimalism, given their circumstances and rent.)

  “Certain things that we’ve been using that came from the world of magic—anybody could use these and take them,” he said expansively. “What distinguishes us from nouvelle cuisine is that we’re deliberately provocative. For a while we were playing with this idea of provoking ‘outside the plate.’ Cuisine is this multisensual experience—so we made a balloon, and put in the balloon the scent of an orange, broke it, and you would have this dish of orange underneath. We had a plate of mushrooms, and they would spray a pint of forest scent on it! We did a lot like this. Liquid nitrogen in the dining room so you’d see the smoke. And for a while this theatricality was getting away from us. It was driving the customers crazy! Doing it is easy—whether you do it well or not. Or we’d blindfold you. We have fifty thousand of these kinds of ideas. But we just thought, No, this isn’t your path.”

  Turning the pages of the book while drawing rapid diagrams and speaking in even more rapid Spanish, Ferran went on to explain that the true point of the deconstructed dessert was to create a kind of analytic Cubism of the pastry plate. It wasn’t an intrinsic part of Black Forest cake’s nature that made you want to break it down into bits but that, if you’re possessed by the urge to break things down into bits, it’s more obvious that you’re doing it when you do it to a Black Forest cake. The Cubists used guitars and tables, ordinary still-life objects, for the same reason: you knew what a guitar or a table looked like, and so could see when it didn’t look that way. Once the fracture was achieved and accepted, you could move on to your own mythology. “If we make a curry ice cream, and you put mushrooms there, and eel—strange!” he said. “But if you put chicken stock, and coconut, then it’s curry.”

  Were we, I asked, on the verge of entirely breaking down the line between sweet and savory?

  He looked at me with delighted triumph. “It can’t be that an American is asking me that!” he said. “A hamburger with ketchup and Coca-Cola? That’s the most intense symbiosis of sweet and savory imaginable. It’s your cultural theme.”

  As Lisa and I approached the door, Ferran grabbed the pages of diagrams and handed them to me for further study. He continued brooding on the subject of dessert, explaining that for him the big question was not that of sweet and savory but that of sequence. “What matters is how we end the meal. With a surprise? A flourish? Reassurance? That’s the big question about dessert: how do we close out dinner? How do we finish the meal?”

  He had a pensive look, and I couldn’t help asking him about Albert’s unmade dream. His face came alive again. “You mean hot ice cream? Yes. Yes! But… it’s hard! Ice cream is ice cream because it’s cold. But gelatin is the same way: gelatin used to be both gelatin and cold. There must be some way. We’ll solve it. We will.” Then he signed the historical diagrams in caps, FERRAN ADRIÀ.

  Dinner at elBulli that night surpassed expectations, and really did earn for Adrià the role or title of artist: craft can make the difficult seem easy, but art alone makes the excessive seem elemental. What sounds crazily complex and over the top on paper—say, goat-brain tartar with eel—seems delicious and even obvious on the plate. Instead of the sudden drop-off between the savories and the sweets, there was a slowly shading spectrum, over twenty-five or thirty small dishes, from savory to sweet, with the two intermingled. Carême’s great artificial act, the one with which French cuisine began—the grassy herbs to one side for the meats; the piquant spices off to the other for the sweets—was broken, and everything was mixed again. There was flash-fried shrimp with cayenne pepper infused and a spun-sugar design above; Iberian smoked ham with a ginger-caramel reduction—and then that Parmesan ice cream with chervil and freeze-dried wild strawberries.

  Two dishes stood out as models of sweet and savory so simply mixed they became a new kind of cooking: a dish of wild strawberries presented in a bouillon of wild hare—the joke, of course, as the server explained, is that the hares in the wild eat wild strawberries (though not, he hastened to add, these particular ones), so we taste them twice—and a plate of scampi infused with sweet ginger with sesame seeds beneath. Where dinner at, say, Thomas Keller’s Per Se can be like a day at the library under the supervision of a monk, dinner at elBulli really is like a visit to Willy Wonka’s candy factory. A sense of fun pervades the place. It is happy food—the one true “dessert” is a “frozen pond,” which is simply a sheet of hyper-hard ice infused with mint. The “molecular” label doesn’t capture the sense of play, extended into the sober domain of fancy food, that gives the place its savor. The illustrated recipe books, no matter how lavishly published, reveal little, because, as with all magicians, the “gimmicks” are cheap and readily available, and break down into foams and powders and frozen shells. Guile and mischief, more than molecular logic, is the guiding principle.

  The test of a meal is the talk it makes, hot air rising from the diners, and the room mostly hummed. It was sad to think that there would be only another few hundred days of this, but wise in another way: Alain S
enderens, Alain Dutournier, both of them provocateurs and originators in their day, declined into gentle excellence. Now, no one will be able to shake his head and say, elBulli isn’t what it used to be—which means that it will become, in memory, by a fixed rule of recall even better than it was.

  And at the elBulli table, I began to see at last why the slow-food movement and techno-emotional cooking, though seemingly based on different premises—one reactionary and anti-technology, the other all technology and naïve futurism—have lived together at our mental table, as a combined part of the moral taste of our time, so easily. The Hestias of the Hearth, following Alice Waters, and the Willy Wonkas of the Chemistry Set, following the Adriàs, were really united in another way, both allied as makers of true slow food. In a world given over to all forms of speed—speed-of-light communication in every sphere, where anything you write electronically is available everywhere on the planet immediately—the commitment to taking time is itself a commitment to a coherent set of values. You could go to Per Se, or you could eat at Chez Panisse, but in either case what you’re doing is going to eat. You’re not going to eat on your way somewhere else, or before some other thing, or hoping to get done in time for Dancing with the Stars. You’re going to eat, in a world where you mostly eat to go.

  The common shape of time was the same, and the real end of dinner is to articulate time. (Or, when it’s bad, to announce new kinds of tedium.) The point of eating is to slow down life long enough to promote what Brillat-Savarin called, with simple charm, good cheer. It doesn’t just take time, but makes time—carves out evenings, memories. That’s what Darwin meant when he said that we recall good dinners as happy days, wrapped like flies in a spider’s web by the silk of memory. Good dinners become happy days. Both Willy and the Hestias do that with splendor and certainty, in a time when no one else does it quite so much. They ask for your attention, not just for your appetite.

  A meal at elBulli showed that the French line setting off savory from sweet could be entirely bypassed, like other French defensive lines in history, by mechanical ingenuity, speed, and superior strategic thinking. But I was still interested in desserts as such, pure desserts, desserts that always ended sweetly. And so the next morning Lisa and I traveled to meet with the young Mozart of pastry, Jordi Roca, at the restaurant he runs with his brothers, in Girona, in northeast Catalonia, about an hour from elBulli.

  Where elBulli is old-fashioned and even a little run-down, as though to frame the hypermodernity of its plates all the more sharply, El Celler de Can Roca, to give the full name of the Roca brothers’ three-star place, is of exquisitely contemporary design, with small groves of poplar trees contained within the zigzagged green-glass walls of the restaurant proper. A long, low-lying wine cellar sits just across an allée of trees from the restaurant, and in it the sommelier, Josep Roca, the second brother—the oldest brother, Joan, is in the kitchen—keeps his wines in tenderly nourishing musical environments, playing recorded melodies in the caves: Bach for the champagne, romantic cello music for the Burgundys, and local guitar music for the Spanish wines.

  Jordi, the baby brother, is still young-looking—startlingly so—at thirty-two. Dreamy of visage and gentle of voice, he came out of the kitchen before lunch, tentative and eager and even a little wide-eyed in his chef whites, to talk about his dessert work. He had inherited the pastry station, he admitted, because it was the younger brother’s station, but he thought that there was room to grow there. “Desserts in Catalonia don’t have the weight of the past,” he explained, in the French he had learned during several stages. “We had crema Catalana. A cake or two or three. So we felt free to invent and compete.”

  After an apprenticeship at elBulli, he realized that his preoccupation was with scent. “That was something that hadn’t really been realized enough in desserts, I thought: the power of aromas. We had this new machine that could extract essential oils, and I began to play with it. I began making perfumed desserts.” He laughed. “I went to Sephora and found the most wonderful aromas in all the women’s perfumes. And I started making desserts built around their smells. Calvin Klein–like aromas. I wanted to make something as wonderful to taste as Chanel perfume was to smell. For me, that’s where all that new chemistry and equipment helps. We have the machine to extract essential oils. Another just for smokes. Working with smokes and smells, this has a—fragile aspect? Sense memory extends to the heart of who we are. I think that there’s a freedom there, for a certain delicacy.” He shrugged. “You’ll see,” he said.

  Did he have a dream dessert that he had tried and failed to perfect? He nodded. “Yes, there’s one I’m working on. I haven’t really… perfected it yet. You see, I’m a big fan of F. C. Barcelona”—the soccer team—“and I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal.” Messi is the great Argentine striker who stars for Barcelona. “I feel I’m close. Could I try it out on you at the end of lunch?”

  The desserts came around. And here was the real thing, here were true desserts: not dancing nimbly on the edge between sweet and salty, like Albert Adrià’, but plain old-fashioned sweets touched by the invention and audacity of a liberated imagination. There was watermelon rind with bitter almonds and tarragon; a hot lemon-mint eucalyptus liquid that, as it was poured, solidified into a small, sweet iceberg. Then lemon custard and granita, with the floral scents in a small cup alongside: you eat and smell by turns. Lemon zest, pure distilled mint flowers. And then an apricot ice-cream bombe with a spun-sugar shell, apricot foam inside, and an apricot sabayon inside that.

  Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

  Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

  An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu Stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

  “Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white candy netting.

  “MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

  You feel… something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

  In those le Carré and Deighton thrillers, the things the antihero learns on the other side of the curtain tend to be brooded on stoically rather than applied with spirit. What you saw on the other side of the curtain stays there. What I learned in Barcelona
was that genius can produce what it chooses—but not much of it was really applicable to the table I sit at or the kitchen I cook in. It wasn’t just that you can’t do this at home; it’s that home is the last place you were ever meant to do this. The earlier great changes in cooking were a kind of baroque template, suitable for simplification—you made haute cuisine with cream and butter, nouvelle cuisine by leaving them out—but “techno-emotional” cooking was created only for the three-star stage. It was pure performance, cabaret cooking, the table as stadium show. As often happens with the avant-gardists, by advancing the form they had only deepened the crisis. There was nothing that you could do with what I had learned, other than serve cake and ice cream while the soccer game was on, which we knew how to do already.

  And yet something, at least, came out of the quest. I invited Bill Yosses, the White House chef, over for dinner, and laid a small trap for him: I was going to make my mother’s apricot soufflé, and see if I could achieve the zone. Over dinner, we talked desserts some more: the mysteries of plating, the needs of family life.

  Then I led him into the kitchen, showed him the apricot-purée base, the transparent egg whites in the unlined copper bowl, the five soufflé dishes waiting to be buttered. He murmured instruction. “Butter around the outer edge, too,” he urged. “All the way around the outer rim like this. Make a small space—climb up to grow up. And then put the dishes in water: not a bain-marie or anything deep, just a shallow tray of water. You don’t want to lower the temperature too much.”

  He watched as I beat the egg whites and they thickened and turned opaque. “Do you know why you use unlined copper?” he asked. “It’s for the static electricity. A small electrical storm going off in the bowl.” An act of God, making clouds of white.