Tastemaker

Dedicated art lovers Franziska and Gerhard Flögel traveled from their home in Germany to a remote cove in northeastern Spain on July 2 to visit the creator in his studio. They toured his inner sanctum in appreciative silence. They marveled at his unusual materials, his precise execution, his sheer ingenuity. And then, like everyone else at El Bulli, they sat down and ate the master’s work.

El Bulli may be the most fussed-over restaurant in the world, its 33-course meals the object of countless gastronomic pilgrimages, its 8,000 reservations per season snapped up in a single day, its edible foams and spheres now part of the contemporary culinary vocabulary. But since its famous chef, Ferran Adrià, was named a featured artist in this year’s edition of Documenta, the provocative contemporary art show held every five years in Kassel, Germany,

El Bulli has also become the center of a lively debate about the aesthetic value of avant-garde cuisine. Suddenly art critics and foodies alike are scrutinizing the gin fizz that manages simultaneously to be hot and cold, the edible “paper” dotted with flowers, the frozen parmesan “air” that comes packed in a Styrofoam tub, and asking: Is it art or is it dinner? “We aren’t saying that cooking is a new art form,” says Ruth Noack, Documenta’s curator. “We’re saying that Ferran Adrià shows artistic intelligence.” That distinction was lost last summer when director Roger Buergel announced that Adrià would be part of this summer’s show, which opened on June 16 and runs through Sept. 23. Skeptics complained that embracing a cook signaled the banalization of Documenta. “Both Adrià’s participation and contribution seem ridiculous to me,” sniffed art critic Robert Hughes, adding that “food is food.” Adrià counters that his critics don’t understand what he does or his role in the art show. “My work is my menu,” he explains. “And my menu is part of a whole, living experience. It wouldn’t be respectful of art to try to bring El Bulli to Documenta.” Instead, Documenta would come to El Bulli.

For each of the 100 days that Documenta lasts, Noack and Buergel select two people to send for dinner at Adrià’s restaurant. “We go into the exhibition space and watch for someone who, figuratively, speaks to us,” says Noack. Franziska Flögel became one of the chosen after she happened to strike up a conversation with the curator about the exhibition’s audio guides, and let slip that she and her husband had been coming to Documenta since 1968. “We had read that two people were being sent each day,” says Flögel. “But we thought it would be the mayor, not people like us.” The next thing Franziska knew, Noack was asking if she would like to have dinner in Spain. A car picked the couple up at 8 a.m. on July 2, and drove them to the airport for their flight to Spain. By 7.30 p.m., they were seated on the patio at El Bulli, enjoying those hot-and-cold gin fizzes. They returned to Kassel the next morning.

If Franziska is the Charlie who won a golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory, Adrià is Willy Wonka. For all his influence and renown, the chef still clearly delights in his work, and his enthusiasm for the joy that food can bring is contagious. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve done,” he says about hosting the Documenta visitors. “You have to see their faces to understand it. It’s not just something conceptual — they live in their flesh. It’s a magical experience.” Although Adrià is quick to point out that other media, such as photography, encountered artistic resistance when they were first introduced, he prefers to stay out of the debate over whether what he does is art or not: “That’s for other people to decide. Cooking is cooking. And if it exists alongside art, that’s wonderful.”

Of course, Adrià’s cooking isn’t like anyone else’s. He and his team spend six months of the year traveling and tasting, trying new ingredients, inventing new techniques. For the Flögels and El Bulli’s 48 other customers on Monday night, the result of all that investigation and inspiration took the form of “spherified” olives that, when put in the mouth, exploded with a gush of intensely flavored olive oil. The liquid yolk of a quail’s egg came wrapped in a hard burnished shell tasting of candy. Citrus pulp turned into a tangy risotto. An utterly normal-looking raspberry, dotted with wasabi, turned out to be crisp and fragile on the outside, and bursting with hot juice on the inside.

If they hadn’t been invited to El Bulli, the Flögels’ dinner there would have set them back nearly $500. By the end of their meal, Franziska, an architect, and Gerhard, a civil engineer, had succumbed to Adrià’s peculiar magic. “I was astonished the whole time I was eating,” says Francisca. Her husband added: “This is a new way to create taste. When you’re here, it’s clear that it’s art.” Perhaps. But by the time Adrià’s diners have worked their way through those 33 dishes, such abstract questions tend to fade into insignificance. At least, that certainly seemed to be the case for the 50 guests who filed out after midnight with childlike smiles of wonder on their faces. For Adrià, their response only reinforces his core belief aboutcooking. “Food,” he likes to say, “is happiness.”