Albert Adrià

I was given this book by my brother-in-law. Otherwise I wouldn't have bought it as it sure takes up a lot of space on a bookshelf whereas it has only enough content to fill a nice article.

This is not to say that it isn't interesting and what little there is I enjoyed reading, but it's not much.

I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to buy this book. It has a lot of pictures, some of them quite nice. It has a few recipes almost all of them impossible to make at home and if you want to cook his recipes (well actually their recipes as it's more a team effort than anything else) all of their recipes are available elsewhere.

I imagine that the point of the book is to give all of us who will never eat at el bulli's a kind of second hand experience of eating at the restaurant. Mister Adrià himself remarks (in this very same book!) that it is very difficult to put a taste into words.

About the food I have obviously very little to say, never having eaten there.

Just as obviously I am not particularly eager to go there (though I wouldn't refuse a gift). The recipes are highly technical, strike me as too complicated, and contain too many additives I spend the rest of my life avoiding. To put it bluntly. Mister Adrià strikes me as the pretty face of the food industry.

I was struck by the fact that the average customer spends only € 30 on wine and drinks at the restaurant. The menu (there is only one) is only € 200 (2008) which is very cheap considering how much time and attention is lavished upon each recipe and each customer.… (mere)

This book is coffee table food porn, seven pounds of food porn, not a good book to curl up in bed with, but certainly a good book to stand in the kitchen with and drool over.

The majority of the book is printed on a think card stock-like paper and inserted into it are smaller, lighter pages where the majority of the text is. It is as thick as my favorite cookbook (the Gold Cook book) which is 1200+ pages, but it is only about 600 pages long. I feel that the choice of paper and style of the book does it a disservice. The size and weight of the book distracts from the content which is fantastic.

Getting a table at elBulli is like winning the gourmand lottery. This book documents, mainly with photographs, one day in the ‘life’ of a restaurant that the majority of us will only experience vicariously through the eyes of others who have been lucky enough to pass beyond its doors each year and deign to share the experience with us. There are a smidgen of recipes included in the book, like Spherical-I green olives, Margarita 2005 and Melon with ham 2005, all of which I can’t wait to try! It also talks about how they approach the process of creating a new dish and how they document everything. I must say that there are very few details about anything, it is more like a very large children’s book. It teases and tantalizes you, like going hungry to a buffet but only being allowed one bite.

Would I get it again? Yes, being a confirmed foodie (yes I got a caviar spherification tool kit for x-mass last year and I have had my eye on transglutaminase for several months) I would definitely get this book again, however I know of very few people who would appreciate or enjoy it, since I will not pay $200.00 plus for one of the elBulli cookbooks, I actually saw a used one on Amazon for $599.99,this will have to do for me.

So if you, or the person that you are thinking about getting this book for, actually knows what transglutaminase is without looking it up, then I would get this book. If spherification, foams or Transglutaminase all cause blank looks then I would say get a different book. Or perhaps check out the DVD Decoding Ferran Adria hosted by Anthony Bourdain.
DS… (mere)