World’s top chef doesn’t want to go back into the kitchen

PARIS: Ferran Adria — “the most influential chef in the world” — is a man on a mission. Just not one that involves him having to run a restaurant. The Catalan — whose elBulli restaurant was named the best on the planet a record five times — is out to prove that the wildly experimental dishes he pioneered there still cut the mustard.

In the seven years since he unexpectedly shut the legendary Costa Brava restaurant, with 3,000 people still on the waiting list for a table, simpler more earthy cooking has come into vogue.

But the father of molecular cuisine, who brought the world the idea of “mandarin air”, eating smoke, caramelised quails, trout egg tempura and any number of foams and emulsions, told AFP that he has not stood still.

“I have not stopped working” nor experimenting, he said, since he shuttered elBulli, which held the maximum three Michelin stars. Back then Adria admitted that he was feeling a little jaded.

But as he explains in a new 15-part documentary series about his incredible rise from dishwasher to culinary superstar, “elBulli: Story of a Dream”, which begins on Amazon Prime on Monday, he has well and truly got his mojo back. It is just that he doesn’t want to go back to cooking at the stove day and night. “It makes no sense for me to open a restaurant,” he told.