Dining at El Celler de Can Roca and elBulli

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Almost four years ago, Chris Young’s first day on the job occurred when he and I had dinner at elBulli. Chris had already agreed to work for me, and he was packing up his stuff for the move to Seattle. Over dinner we talked about food, and I showed him the outline I had made for Modernist Cuisine. It was the start of a project that was bigger than either of us realized (although we wound up sticking remarkably close to that early outline). So, what could be a better way to celebrate the completion of the project than for Chris, Max, and I to pay one last visit to elBulli in the final months that it still operates as a restaurant? (Ferran Adrià has announced plans to halt service at elBulli in July.)

Unfortunately, my schedule is crazy, and it looked for a while like I wouldn’t make it back to Spain in time. When an opening occurred on my calendar (as luck would have it, Chris wasn’t available then), I quickly threw together a group, and off we went. I was joined by Max Bilet, my other MC coauthor; Steven Shaw, a cofounder of eGullet; Dr. Tim Ryan, president of the Culinary Institute of America; Johnny Iuzzini, executive pastry chef of Jean Georges; and Thierry Rautureau, chef of Rover’s in Seattle (where I was a stagier 15 years ago).

Max and I arrived in Barcelona from Paris the night before everyone else flew in, so we had dinner at Tickets: the new tapas bar opened only a month before by Albert Adrià, Ferran’s brother. It is clearly going for a fun and casual atmosphereas one example, the menu has a little icon suggesting which dishes would be good for children.

As at Bazaar, the modern tapas restaurant run by José Andrés in Los Angeles, the menu mixes fairly traditional tapas dishes with Modernist tapas. We sampled plenty of both. Albert is doing a terrific job; the food we had was great. The execution of the more technically challenging dishes was perfect.

The next day, everyone else arrived. An amusing cultural difference one notices in Spain is that the term “wok” is used essentially to mean “Asian restaurant.” As a result, one finds many restaurants with names like “Sushi Wok” or “Ichiban Wok”, the latter advertising Japanese and Argentinian food.

We started our adventure by walking all over Barcelona and visiting three of its famous food markets. La Boqueria is the most famous, and we spent a bunch of time there, looking at the fabulous produce and eating razor clams and octopus at one of the great seafood bars in the market. We also visited Mercat de Sant Antoni and Mercat de Santa Caterina. A picnic with various types of jamón ibérico at the Barcelona marina tided us over until dinnertime.

The first serious eating was dinner at El Celler de Can Roca, which is in the town of Girona, about an hour north of Barcelona, where we were staying. The restaurant is run by the three Roca brothers: chef Joan, pastry chef Jordi, and Josep, who runs the front of the house and an amazing wine cellar.

The previous Can Roca was a very nice restaurant, but it was no architectural masterpiece. I had been there a few years back. The old location is still operated by the Roca brothers, but they moved their flagship restaurant to a spectacular new location. Between the decor and the food, it is one of the truly great restaurants of the world.

Our meal was incredible. We had 15 savory courses followed by seven dessert courses and then petits fours. One of the amusing “courses” was a smell-only course, served as a paper cone that was impregnated with scent. It was interesting, but it also made for some cool photo ops as everyone at the table put the cone over his nose, as we were instructed. Alas, I am not going to describe every course, if I put off this post until I had the time to do that, it would be many more weeks, but the pictures tell much of the story.

The next day, we had to recover from the night before (it was after 3 AM when we got back to the hotel) as well as to prepare for elBulli. As part of the “training regimen,” some of us had another walk around the city, including more market visits and a museum or two. I literally did not consume anything that day, apart from coffee. We arrived a bit early at Cala Montjoi, the bay where elBulli is located, so we took a walk on the beach and then headed to our table. As is their tradition, the first set of courses, or “snacks” as Ferran puts it, is served outdoors on the patio. We then moved inside for our table in the kitchen.

Calling elBulli a “restaurant” and what we experienced a “meal” stretches the meanings of those words beyond their normal usage so much that they barely serve their purpose. If you haven’t ever been to elBulli, this will sound strange. But that’s because elBulli is not like any other dining experience in the world.

Here is an architectural analogy. Our cooking lab is in an ugly single-story warehouse. The building is fully functional in so far as it keeps the rain off our heads (no small matter in the Seattle area), but no one would mistake it for art. Most food consumed in the world is created to refuel people, and it is often just as prosaic as the warehouse. It serves its function, but little beyond that.

In addition to spending time in the lab, I work in an office building. It is a pleasant five-story building, and I have a nice corner office on the top floor. If you had only seen concrete warehouses, then you’d be pretty amazed by this building: it has multiple floors, a dressy lobby, and in some directions, some decent views of Bellevue and Seattle off in the distance. It is clearly a fancier proposition than the warehouse.

A lot of restaurant meals are like my office building. They offer more courses (like the multiple floors), and they are made from more refined materials by much more skilled people. Yet much the way my office building remains essentially a distant relative of the warehouse, these meals, too, serve mundane purposes, albeit with a tip of the hat to aesthetics.

The really great restaurants are more like an office building in Manhattan, where there are many more floors, a lobby of inlaid granite, and some amazing views. These buildings are made by craftsmen who are far more skilled than the people who build warehouses. The design is better, too, and the best of these buildings say, the famous Lever House in New York Citybear the mark of an artist, at least to those who are sufficiently skilled in seeing the subtle features.

Not everyone who walks past the Lever House marvels at the quiet artistry of it. That’s okay because many people don’t need or frankly don’t want to see the art, they want to see a really nice building, which the Lever House happens to be. The same is true for great restaurants, most of them would still be okay for people who just want a good meal. They may miss the finer points, but the food is still accessible.

Now consider a dramatic and iconic building like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. If all you had ever experienced was a one-story concrete warehouse, you’d be pretty amazed to see this gigantic titanium sculpture. Nothing about it is normal there are no conventional windows, for starters, and it has essentially no right angles anywhere. It is architecture as art, and with its soaring forms, this building grabs you in an emotional way that no warehouse ever could. Those who are schooled in the nuances of architecture pick up more of Gehry’s master work than others do, but even the most jaded tourist is awed by the drama of that building. It is a masterpiece. The man who made it is an artist, and the art comes in the way that it seizes you.

Well, that, times 10, is elBulli (at least for me). As you may have gathered, I like architecture, but I like food more, so take the analogy with a grain of salt. The point is that elBulli offers an artistic experience that is on the magnitude of the greatest art in other categories. As such, it is not really a normal meal, anymore than visiting the Guggenheim Museum is a normal thing you do (at least for people who don’t live in Bilbao).

Instead of public buildings, I could have chosen for comparison homes or any other sort of building. We need buildings for purely prosaic reasons, but we lavish additional care on some of them and turn others into art. If architecture leaves you cold, then one could build a similar analogy around music, or painting, or any of the other arts. So, if you’re a lover of opera rather than an architecture aficionado, it is like attending the Bayreuth Festival. If it is painting that excites you, it is the Louvre or MoMA. You don’t visit those places every day, and you wouldn’t eat at elBulli every day either.

This season, which unfortunately will be the last for elBulli as a restaurant, was true to form. The meal was a stunning series of over 50 dishes. As in the 2010 season, many of the courses came in series of three to five, with each series studying a particular theme from different points of view. One series was about truffles, which was a special feature of this spring’s season because elBulli normally opens to the public during the summer, when truffles are not available. Another series of dishes looked at Japanese themes, one dish comprised thin sheets of ice in an origami envelope. Soy sauce was dripped on top, and there was some fresh wasabi on the ice. That’s it. You ate the dish by grabbing the ice sheets with tweezers and eating nothing but ice with soy and wasabi.

If that sounds strange, well, it was to some degree. But it was also a brilliant commentary on essential Japanese flavors and how they have spread beyond their homeland to invade other cuisines. Today, you can put soy and wasabi on nearly anything (even on Korean tacos from Los Angeles food trucks). In a world where these ingredients can be used anywhere, why not put them on the plainest of substrates?

This was only one of the many dishes, each a work of art expressed in food. Some, like the soy and wasabi, were a commentary or reaction to trends or traditions. Others were purely creative inventions all on their own. Each presented a unique view of food, and it is that search for novel perspectives to which Ferran has dedicated his career so far. It will be fascinating to see what he comes up with in the next stage of his work.

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The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, Part 2

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Climbing the Learning Curve

[See part one of this series for recollections by photographer Ryan Matthew Smith about how he came to join the MC team.]

After editing photos for a couple of months, we realized that we would need quite a few more images to flesh out the layouts of the first few chapters of Modernist Cuisine. Nathan, however, was increasingly busy with both his day job and author duties, so much so that he had almost no time to generate new photos. I was asked to do more shooting; it wasn’t seen at the time as a shift in the lead photography role, just a temporary necessity.

A shot from my first day of work on the book
A shot from my first day of work on the book

To make it easier to shoot freshly prepared dishes, we decided to set up a photo studio around the corner from the newly constructed research kitchen at the Intellectual Ventures laboratory. Our head chef, Maxime Bilet, served as lead food stylist and schedule master for the photo shoots.

Another first-day shot
Another first-day shot

The first months were quite the learning process for Max and me. I had just earned my photography degree from the Art Institute of Seattle, but still I had very little studio experience, and zero experience shooting food. Max had an art background and experience plating food, but only for diners, never for the camera.

The best photo from my first shoot
The best photo from my first shoot

Back then, I didn’t know much about Max or even chefs in general. During one early photo shoot, I saw a fly buzz around and land on the cutting board we were about to photograph. I quickly grabbed the chef’s knife from Max and chopped down on the cutting board as if wielding an axe. Whack!

I cleaved the fly clean in half. Amazed at my feat of dexterity, I grinned over at Max, expecting validation of my daunting skill. Instead, I was met with a stern glare that said “don’t ever do anything like that again.” It turns out chefs’ knives are finely crafted tools and are not meant to be whacked like axes on cutting boards.

Who knew?

The *right* way to use a chef's knife
The right way to use a chef’s knife

Those first few months were like a crash course in cooking, fine dining, and what is (and is not) acceptable in a kitchen. Every day I learned new lessons about the details of gourmet and modernist techniques; knowledge that turned out to be absolutely necessary for both shooting and selecting the photos we used to illustrate step-by-step procedures in the book.

After a month, our style starts to click in place
After a month, our style starts to click in place

Although I started with the cooking skills of a typical American college student, knowing little more than what I had read on boxes of dried pasta, I had to learn quickly what a PID controller is, the difference between braising and pot-roasting, the names of exotic foods such as Buddha’s hand (a citron fruit), and myriad other bits of specialized information.

Buddha's hand citron
Buddha’s hand citron

Luckily, I was working side by side with a team of talented chefs who were happy to share such knowledge and correct me when I missed some important point.

Today I am much smarter about food than I was. I still might not be able to reproduce in my own kitchen all the amazing dishes created by the chefs on the Modernist Cuisine culinary team, but three years of working with them has given me much greater appreciation of their incredible skills and understanding of their techniques. And I’ve also learned how to stay out of their way and respect their equipment!

Maxime has a talent for making food look stunning
Maxime has a talent for making food, such as this cocoa tajarin, look stunning

See Maxime Bilet and Ryan Matthew Smith at Maker Faire

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Modernist Cuisine head chef and coauthor Maxime Bilet will join lead photographer Ryan Matthew Smith at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 this weekend in the Bay Area. Hear them talk about the making of the book and taste one of the Modernist Cuisine dishes for yourself. Ryan and Max will be presenting on the center stage on Sunday, May 22, from 3:30 p.m to 4:30 p.m. For directions and tickets, see the Maker Faire website.

MakerFaire

Vote on the Prints You’d Like to See Included with MC

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[UPDATE May 19: The votes are in and tallied, and the winners are:

  1. Pectin falling from orange
  2. Levitating cheeseburger
  3. Pot roast cutaway
  4. Frying egg

We’ll be including prints of these stunners with every copy of Modernist Cuisine in a future printing. Thanks for participating!]

We’re plan­ning to include two or three 8 x10 prints of some of our most iconic pho­tos along with the books in a future print­ing of Modernist Cuisine. We invite your help in decid­ing which pho­tos to bun­dle with the book. Check the boxes next to your favorite three images from the selec­tion below, and then click the “Vote” button to submit your choices. We’ll select from among those that get the most votes. The poll closes on May 18 at 5:00 p.m. PDT.

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The Culinary Team Answers Questions from Readers

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On eGullet, an online forum for cooking enthusiasts that played an important role in inspiring Nathan to undertake Modernist Cuisine, a lively discussion has emerged among people who are trying their hand at various recipes and techniques in the book. They have been sharing questions that have emerged naturally as they experiment with the dishes and share their hits and misses.

Coauthor Maxime Bilet and the rest of the Modernist Cuisine culinary team posted some answers today to a number of those questions on eGullet’s “Cooking with Modernist Cuisine” thread. The authors are excited about engaging the growing community of MC readers, and we’re working to build a simple forum here on ModernistCuisine.com to support that discussion. (If you’re interested in volunteering as a forum moderator, please email us.) In the meantime, check out the insights the team offers at eGullet.

Tips from Modernist Cuisine You Can Use at Home

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In a lengthy article in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, food writer Sophie Brickman describes making breakfast with author Nathan Myhrvold. The Chronicle story also lists many tips from the books that will be useful to home cooks, including strategies for extending the shelf life of fruits, frying herbs, and making tender burgers and perfect scrambled eggs. Modernist Cuisine offers full explanations of how these tips work and why.

The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, Part 1

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Getting the Pot Boiling

About three-and-half years ago, I was fresh out of my fourth run at a college education. This time, however, I actually managed to finish a two-year program and earned a degree in photography from the Art Institute of Seattle. I set out to get a job with little more than a couple of portfolios filled with nature and architecture photography; I had no real-world work experience to speak of. After four months just scraping by, I saw an ad on Craigslist seeking a photo editor with excellent compositing skills and three years of work experience. It made no mention of a book.

The position seemed intriguing, so I sent in a link to my website and a very long email pumping myself up (it probably read like I was trying to fight off assignments, clients were blowing up my phone, and I had been an established photographer for 10 years). Wayt Gibbs, the editor in chief of Modernist Cuisine, wrote back. I was in for an interview!

I’m terrible in interviews: I get nervous, avoid eye contact, clip my answers short, talk extremely quietly, answer “I don’t know,” and sweat profusely. I confess I was a bit starstruck at first: I had heard of Nathan during a photography lecture at school, but it had never occurred to me that I might one day meet the man, let alone interview to work for him!

Luckily, Wayt and Nathan looked past that and focused on my photography. Most of the meetings were spent by Wayt and Nathan explaining the project to make sure I knew what I was getting into. I didn’t have to say much other than YES THAT SOUNDS AMAZING while trying not to come off as unprofessionally enthusiastic.

The basic rundown was that Nathan, Wayt, and a couple others had begun work on a cookbook, and I would act as both Nathan’s photo assistant and lead photo editor on the project. Nathan is an award-winning photographer, and he was planning to shoot the entire book himself (on top of doing most of the writing and running Intellectual Ventures). Long before this, he had come up with the concept of making “cutaway” shots to illustrate what goes on inside food as it cooks. In fact, he had already shot some test images for the first cutaways and had made a bunch of amazing photo micrographs in his home microscopy lab. My job would be to do the Photoshop work, keep all the photos organized, and handle rights and permissions for any stock photography we used in the book.

An early photomicrograph Nathan shot of trichinella in pig muscle.

In my first two days on the job, I went to Nathan’s house in a Seattle suburb to assist him and Chris Young with the first photo shoot. We started in the kitchen, shooting images for step-by-step illustrations of combi oven techniques. Then we moved to a studio set up in the garage to take photos of two pans that the Intellectual Ventures machine shop had cut in half. These images eventually became part of the very first three cutaways.

A test shot made in December 2007 to work out ideas for cutaway photographs.

The broccoli cutaway that appears both inside volume 2 and on its cover was the highlight of that first shoot. Chris and Nathan worked away, slicing blanched broccoli in half and pinning the florets in place with toothpicks, while I moved lights and cards for Nathan before he snapped the shot. At the end of the day, we had a very iconic photo that would heavily influence the direction and style of photography for the book.

We used toothpicks to hold broccoli florets in place during shooting. The handle of the lid was later removed digitally.
First lay­out sketch for the steam­ing broc­coli cut­away. Note the graph con­cept that shows steam­ing cook­ing faster than boil­ing. When we con­ducted exper­i­ments in the lab to gather data for the real chart, how­ever, we found to our sur­prise that the reverse is true: boil­ing is slightly faster, as shown (and explained) in the final ver­sion in the book.

Nathan set many goals for us during that first week, and we accomplished most of them. But one remains unfulfilled. After shooting a rib eye steak in Nathan’s combi oven, he, Chris, and I were standing around the kitchen polishing off the perfectly cooked rare meat when Nathan shouted out, “Let Ryan have more; he’s way too skinny!” A moment later he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll fatten you up by the end of this project.” Although I ate very well during the course of the project, I’m still stuck at 155 pounds!

The final broccoli cutaway image

To Err Is Human

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The second printing of Modernist Cuisine started rolling off the presses at the end of March. Customers will start receiving the first books from that new print run in July. Our current order is 25,000 copies. We hope that satisfies demand, but we were wrong once before, and we may be wrong again. We are monitoring the situation and will order more books if it seems warranted.

In our original plan, we thought that the 6,000 copies of the first printing would give us some time and extra eyes to find any typographical errors. We had many copy editors and proofreaders to help us pore over the book, but after the nth reading, you become blind to any further errors. Ultimately, the way that remaining errors in a book are found is by readers.

Unfortunately, the enormous demand for MC and the unexpected delays in shipping the books to customers meant that we had very little time, with very few readers, to find errors. By the time we had to send our final files to press for the second print run, fewer than 2,000 copies were in customers’ hands.

I posted on eGullet that I was interested in finding errors. We received several responses from Chris Amirault, Chris Hennes, and others in the thread, “Cooking with Modernist Cuisine.” These responses were very helpful.

But then we started getting emails from Larry Lofthouse. Like so many people I’ve met on eGullet, I don’t know much about him personally. What I do know is that Larry is an error-finding machine—he started sending me an email almost every hour with mistakes he had found. Some weren’t really errors, but just appeared so. Others were cosmetic issues or wording changes that are a judgment call, but some were real, honest-to-goodness goofs. Frankly, I’m embarrassed by some of them, but I’m glad they were found.

Finding errors caused a dilemma. The second printing was just about to start; we had a couple days at most to make the final changes. So I emailed Larry to let him know about our situation. He went into high gear, as did the whole MC team. We worked night and day and wound up scrubbing the entirety of MC. Then we corrected and reproofed everything Larry and the others had found and (just barely) made our press deadline.

Larry did all of this work because it seemed to him like the right thing to do. He never asked for anything in return, but we are so grateful that we’re giving him a copy of the second printing, and we have invited him and a guest over for dinner at the lab later in April. Thousands of people will have a better experience with MC due to Larry’s efforts.

That’s not to say that we have now corrected every last error, however. Indeed, in the days since the presses started running again, we, Larry, and other readers have identified a few more mistakes. If and when we undertake a third printing, we’ll correct those, too.

In the meantime, we are making available here a list of corrections and clarifications for the first printing. We’ll update this list whenever new goofs are spotted. It’s available in PDF format as well, in case you want to print it out or have a handy searchable version on your computer. If you spot a mistake in your copy that isn’t already mentioned here, please send it in.

See Our Culinary Team in Action at ICE

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The Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) had a camera crew roving around during our event there last month, and has just released a nice video showing how the Modernist Cuisine culinary team pulled together with a terrific bunch of students to wow the guests with their amazing food.

There is a minor text error in the video, so we should clarify for the record that Kyle Connaughton was the head chef of the development kitchen at The Fat Duck restaurant while Maxime was staging there. Maxime was later the head chef at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, and is the head chef of our research kitchen at The Cooking Lab as well as a coauthor of the book.

http://youtu.be/niZu5_adUgQ?hd=1

Where Will You Put Your Copy?

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Readers who preordered early have been so excited to finally receive their copies of Modernist Cuisine that they have been emailing us photos of the books in their kitchen, libraries, or living rooms. As the 6,000 sets from the first printing make their way to customers—more than 4,500 have already been delivered, and the rest are in various stages of distribution—the proud owners have a decision to make. Where do you put such a lovely and large five-volume set? (It’s clear where the sixth volume, the waterproof Kitchen Manual, belongs: in the kitchen!) The snapshots below show a few owners’ answers to that question, including a video from Seattle Food Geek. Send us your photo and we’ll add it to the slideshow.

If you preordered but are still waiting patiently for your copy to arrive, know that it is coming. We’ve received a handful of emails from customers who were told by Barnes & Noble that their order had been cancelled. Rest assured that we’re in touch with Barnes & Noble and other retailers who are selling the book so that they have the latest information about when the next shipments will arrive at their warehouses. B&N assures us that all who have ordered Modernist Cuisine so far will receive copies, and they are getting in touch directly with customers who received incorrect information. Most of the back ordered books will be shipped this month.

The remaining 2,000 or so orders that exceeded the first printing will be filled when copies arrive from the second printing, starting in July and continuing through the summer. As much as we’d love to tell you exactly when your book will arrive, we don’t have access to that information. All we can say is that, based on what we’re hearing from customers who now have the book, you’ll find it was worth the wait.

VIDEO: Seattle Food Geek Unboxes His Copy

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