So much of what we eat is not quite what it seems. Surrealism has spread from the canvas to the plate, and the acknowledged master of the genre is Ferran Adrià, the brilliant, quirky chef who hides his talents in a beach-side restaurant at the end of a mountain track in an obscure corner of Catalonia in north-eastern Spain. Adrià recently celebrated 20 years of cooking at El Bulli, the bulldog. He is the inventor of froths and foams that take the place of traditional sauces in contemporary restaurants. He offers golden salmon “caviar” in the traditional blue can, but the eggs that burst in the mouth are made of melon juice, a total surprise. His signature dish is an ice cream sandwich, both filling and wafers piquant with Parmesan cheese.

It can be no coincidence that Salvador Dali, master of surrealism, spent much of his life only 25 miles away. Adrià’s medium is food, but he presents a similarly disquieting world of familiar symbols turned upside down. As I arrive in the restaurant, I am welcomed into the kitchen, where an immense calm reigns. Amid the stainless steel and banks of ovens, there is little sign of food. Lively, bright-eyed, younger than I expected (he is 42) Chef Adrià greets me kindly. We identify a common language, French. He explains that much of the cooking is done a day ahead, a system that only partially accounts for the flawlessly timed service of more than 30 dishes over five hours. “We used to do the same at lunch too,” smiles Adrià “I don’t know how, it all passed in a blur.” I ask if winter will be less strenuous, and he flinches. “No, no, winter is worse, I have to travel to New York, to publicize my book.”

His cookbook “El Bulli:1998-2002“ is like no other. The first volume of three, it details in words and images the dishes he has recently created, backed by a CD Rom of nearly 500 recipes. Pictures of experiments in petrie dishes and test tubes alternate with graphic compositions of the perfected recipe. All is described in a pictogram system invented by Ferran Adrià himself and reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs. “I want to create a catalog for cuisine,” he says. “It is important that we share knowledge. I want cooks to stop and reflect on what they are doing. Ninety percent is habit and I want to question habits, to look at the mirror in the morning and to question what is there.”

Installed on the terrace at El Bulli as the sun goes down, I sip a dry Fino Quinto sherry and review the dinner menu, a dazzling display of over 30 tastes so tiny they are served with miniature flatware. The servers need to tell us not just what the edibles are, but how to eat them. We start with frothy rose tea spiked with minute capsules of honey, the rose beside each small glass a reminder of both the tea and our location – Rosas is the nearest town. Next come three crispies: a flat, perfect 3-inch round of potato flavored with lemon and black olive; a feathery wafer of raspberry purée; and the deep-fried, instantly recognizable cartilege of a rabbit’s ear. El Bulli is not for the faint of stomach.

Now comes a call to attention: four whole almonds cooked with the basic flavors of oil, acid, salt, and sugar. This is what cooking is all about. The play on appearance continues with a deep-fried sardine skeleton wrapped in a shroud of cotton candy, and a perfectly spherical “egg yolk” with mango purée trapped inside. A glass of orange soup challenges the palate, the surface tasting purely of carrot, the bottom of mandarin, with a tantalizing mix in between. I cannot even guess how all this is achieved -- so much is trompe l’oeil, of the palate as well as the eye.

Ferran Adrià manipulates food with astonishing mastery. His foaming sauces swept contemporary kitchens five years ago but few other chefs get them right. His two-meter long spaghetti, a curious creation of Parmesan cheese that is served cold and melts in the mouth, has been reported worldwide. Adrià plays with appearance, texture, color, but never with taste. He has an unerring instinct for extracting maximum pure flavor from such simple beginnings as peanut butter (which he serves in a toothpaste tube that is frankly kitsch), crisp chicken skin served with an orange blossom, and a deceptive purée of potato that turns out to be an ideal, perfumed essence of lemon. If his cooking were not so delicious, I would be tempted to dismiss Ferran Adrià as a mad scientist.

The chef is not alone in his links to science and surrealism. In portraying “A Master Cook,” the Elizabethan poet Ben Jonson could well have been describing Adrià:

“Why he’s the man of men,
For a professor! He designs, he draws,
He paints, he carves, he builds, he fortifies,
Makes citadels of curious fowl and fish …
[He] teacheth all the tactics, at one dinner.”

Tactics, there we go. Ferran Adrià has a strong sense of theatre, not to say battle. He is adept at the feint (false quinoa), the frontal tack (one ingredient, four flavors), the disguise (egg yolk of mango). He is certainly a landscape designer. One of his desserts resembles the Painted Desert, a panorama of dark and light chocolate, shades of coffee and caramel, brought to life in granules that melt teasingly on the tongue.

Moving into modern times, in the 1930s the Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti, proposed a revolution in food. He dared to attack dried pasta, likening it to “archaeological worms” that would linger in the stomachs of consumers. His “cookbook” was an artistic joke, a manifesto to revitalize Italian culture by changing eating habits. The book proposes menus, such as an “improvised dinner” in which “every person has the sensation of eating not just good food, but also works of art.” Divorced Eggs consists of halved hard boiled eggs, the intact yolks set on a purée of potato and the whites on a purée of carrot. The futurists made seaweed foams and were great proponents of gelatin. They would have loved Adrià’s spaghetti.

Our meal ends with two surprises not listed on the menu, first a shimmering “cake” of white chocolate froth that holds shape when the protective paper is peeled, but evaporates on the tongue like flakes of falling snow. As a last, grand illusion, a bread baguette arrives at the table, hardly top choice to end a 30-course dinner. But the joke is on us. An eggshell thin crust of bread dough has somehow been constructed to imitate a whole loaf, and the inside is completely hollow. Has the whole meal been a similar illusion?

Let’s be quite clear about this – Ferran Adrià has been credited with taking Spain into the forefront of gastronomy, but his style is all his own. It bears little relation to traditional Spanish cooking, though he points out that his menus of a series of little snacks follow the tapas tradition. What inspired Adrià, he says, was the adage of the French chef, Jacques Maximin: “Cuisine is not to copy, but to move ahead.” Today Ferran Adrià is probably the most influential chef in the world. In the US he inspires chefs such as Charlie Trotter in Chicago and Roxanne Klein in Larkspur, California. Stagiaires flock to his kitchen and even the mighty Alain Ducasse acknowledges his brilliance.

However Adrià’s food – peanut butter, sardine skeleton, horse and turtle dove, is not for everyone. Inevitably among such a barrage of innovation, some dishes – though surprisingly few -- do not succeed. I found a mold of tuna confit with tuna oil too fishy. The most beautiful dish of all, “gnocchi” of crystal-clear balloons of rosewater in a delicate lime extract topped with tiny shreds of rose petals, reminded me hauntingly of jellyfish. “Not for the squeamish” said one of my fellow-diners, “Harry Potter, party games,” added another.

What an unforgettable evening! Witty, provocative, a bravura technical performance, I’ve been mulling it over ever since. The staccato descriptions of the Spanish menu, as rarified as a Gregorian chant, can only hint at the spirit of the occasion. How can sopa de pomelo con sesamo negro al estragon convey the beauty of a glinting pool of pomelo juice (pomelo, or shaddock, is a primitive citrus) marbled like watered silk with purées of black sesame seeds and tarragon?

My problem is, can this be considered food? Great cooking should nourish the soul and body as well as the mind. I do not doubt that with no trouble at all Ferran Adrià could produce a memorable traditional feast. By any standards he is one of the master cooks – perhaps the master – of his generation. He’s chosen a different route from the others and we are all the richer for his insights. But to judge his influence on the future, we will have to wait.

GETTING THERE: Understandably, El Bulli is a hot ticket. The restaurant is open only six months in the year from May to September, and takes 50 diners each day (there are more staff, 55 of them, than customers). For the 8,000 available places in 2003 there were 300,000 requests for a meal that costs less than $200 (without wine).

phone 34.9721.50457  fax: 34.9721.50717. email: bulli@elbulli.com

EL BULLI AT HOME: “El Bulli: 1998-2002” by Ferran Adrià (with Julì Soler and Albert Adrià) retails at around $185 in the US. It is available from Kitchen Arts and Letters in New York, tel: 212.876.5550 and online at www.gourmandbooks.com.

LaVarenne was delighted to host a special Master Class session last June for WCR (Women Chefs and Restaurateurs) --- a grand time was had by all!

Row 1:  Nicole Pederson, Ann Cooper, Lidia Bastianich, Kathleen de Chadenedes, Cynthia Keller
Row 2: Tracey Hayward Osuch, Anne Willan, Randall Price, Molly Gallagher
Row 3: Marty Bracken, José Osuch, Melanie Yaksich, Michelle Le Bleu, Anne Quatrano, Janis McLean
Row 4: Brittany Willams, Andrew King, Patti Weihl, Clifford Harrison, Anu Duggal, Laura Calder

Anne Willan’s current release, Good Food, No Fuss – the title tells it all! -- is available in stores nationwide (BBC Books, London; US edition by Stewart, Tabori and Chang). In the fall, look out for Anne’s next release, How to Cook At Home, also with Stewart, Tabori and Chang. A must for the passionate cook, How to Cook At Home is a treasure of cooking techniques with more than 350 recipes especially designed for the home cook. Illustrated with more than 250 pictures, this is sure to be a staple for your cooking library as Anne features new and traditional techniques for the home chef. Photos for the book were taken at Château du Feÿ, home to La Varenne’s master classes in Burgundy, France.

Also this year, Anne will turn to one of her favorite topics: culinary history. The University of California Press has commissioned Anne to write a new work on the subject which draws on the antiquarian cookbook collection which she and her husband Mark Cherniavsky have built up over the past 35 years. Highlights from this collection are being presented at COPIA (The American Center for Wine, Food and The Arts) in an exhibit, A Feast of Words, opening Friday, March 5 at the Center’s headquarters in Napa, California. Special events are scheduled that weekend with Anne and Mark and the exhibit will continue for three months. For more information, please visit www.copia.org.

Anne Willan will be directing four six-day programs at the renowned resort, The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia this spring. Program dates are March 21- 26, March 28 - April 2, April 4 - April 9 and April 25 - 30. This year’s programs feature guest chefs and teachers Tim Love (Lonesome Dove Western bistro, Fort Worth TX), cookbook author Andrew Schloss, Donald Barickman (Magnolia’s, Charleston, SC), teacher and author John Ash, Melissa Kelly and Price Kushner (Primo Restaurant, Rockland, ME), Anne Quatrano and Clifford Harrison (Bacchanalia’s, Buckland, GA), and author and teacher Nick Malgieri. We are also delighted to welcome back Riki Senn, longtime director of The Greenbrier’s Culinary Arts Center, now director of training and quality control for the Viking Culinary Arts Center.

For more information and bookings, please visit www.greenbrier.com or call Eve Cohen, director of the The Greenbrier’s Culinary Arts Center at 304.536.7863 or 800.228.5049.

Learn the art of fine cooking with Anne Willan at LaVarenne in Burgundy, France this summer! Join us for an unforgettable five days at Château du Feÿ for LaVarenne’s renowned master classes June 13 -18, June 20 - 25, June 27 - July 2 and July 4 - 9. The master class sessions offer unparalleled opportunities to enjoy and experience the art of fine cooking in a stunning 17^th century chateau. For more information and bookings, please visit www.lavarenne.com or contact LaVarenne’s new office in Austin, Texas at 800.537.6486.

This year brings changes in LaVarenne representation as we will be saying a sad farewell to our friend and colleague Janis McLean who has provided 11 years of outstanding service to LaVarenne programs and students. Janis has decided to further pursue her career as a chef and culinary instructor, while generously agreeing to stay on in 2004 as a LaVarenne director, both to ease the transition and advise Anne and Mark with business development. Janis is working closely with Cathy Cochran Lewis, the new LaVarenne representative, as the office moves from Washington DC to Austin, Texas. Cathy is the former director of the Central Market Cooking Schools and will be assisted by Kate Rowe, who has spent three seasons at Château du Feÿ, most recently as the editorial associate for How To Cook At Home.

The Central Market Cooking Schools again welcome Anne Willan back to Texas in February and March. Anne will conduct cooking classes for Central Market in Houston, February 23-24; Austin, February 26-27; San Antonio, February 28; Fort Worth, March 1; and Dallas, March 2. Please contact your nearest Central Market location for details or refer to www.centralmarket.com. Anne also is appearing at the Philadelphia Book and Cook Festival, March 15 and will be teaching at Sur La Table in Santa Monica, California, April 12. For class details, please consult www.surlatable.com.

We have a new look! We’ve expanded and remodeled the LaVarenne website, www.lavarenne.com, and have created a new one featuring our rental program for Château du Feÿ, home to the LaVarenne culinary programs in Burgundy France. The new website, www.chateaudufey.com, takes you on a tour of the rental accommodations and amenities of this fabulous 17^th century chateau that has been lovingly restored by Anne and Mark. Take a first step towards planning a chateau vacation in Burgundy by visiting our new site!

Nicole Aloni’s follow-up book --- Cooking for Company, has just been released by HP Books.
Bob Brody is the Executive Chef of Pechanga, a Native American Casino about 50 miles north of San Diego, CA. It is a four diamond property with ten food outlets and 360 employees.
Kirsten Dixon’s newest book The Winterlake Lodge Cookbook - Culinary Adventures in the Wilderness has just been published by Graphic Arts Publishing, (Portland, OR).
Judith Fertig’s newest book, All American Desserts has been published by Harvard Common Press.
Judy Hill is an Associate Publisher  with Kalmbach Publishing Co.  She is responsible for four magazines and the book division.
Tanya Holland’s newest book, New Soul Cooking has been released by Stewart, Tabori and Chang.
Catherine Jones’ second book, Eating for Pregnancy: An Essential Guide to Nutrition with Recipes for the Whole Family (co-authored by Rose Ann Hudson) has been published  by Marlowe & Company.
Sheryl Julian, along with co-author Julie Riven, has a new book, The Way We Cook: Recipes from the New American Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin).
Mauny Kaseburg is the Marketing Coordinator for Russian River Valley Winegrowers in Sonoma, CA. The RRVW represents winegrowers, wineries, restaurants, farmers, artisan food producers, inns and hotels.
Faye Levy  has a new book, Feast from the Mideast (HarperCollins).
Eric Villegas in Okemos, Michigan won a regional Emmy award from the Michigan Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as host of the food show Fork in the Road.
Virginia Willis is the producer of Turner South's popular cooking show, Home Plate. The step-by-step cooking program demonstrates how to prepare new Southern cuisine for a healthier lifestyle.

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