'World's best restaurant' elBulli to reopen as a museum in Spain this month

Visitors will be able to see models of chef Ferran Adria's innovative dishes

Spanish chef Ferran Adria in the former dining room of his elBulli restaurant that will open as a museum. AFP

Spain's elBulli, repeatedly voted the world's best restaurant before it closed more than a decade ago, is set to reopen as a museum dedicated to the culinary revolution it sparked.

Nestled in an isolated cove on Spain's north-eastern tip, the museum has been named elBulli1846, which is a reference to the 1,846 dishes groundbreaking chef Ferran Adria says were developed at the restaurant.

“It's not about coming here to eat, but to understand what happened in elBulli,” Adria, 61, said of the restaurant he helmed for more than two decades.

The museum will open on June 15, about 12 years after the restaurant served its final dish to the public.

Visitors will be able to see hundreds of photos, notebooks, trophies and models made of plastic or wax that emulate some of the innovative dishes that were served at the eatery.

A foundation set up to maintain elBulli's legacy invested €11 million ($11.8 million) in the museum. Plans to expand the building on the idyllic Cala Montjoi cove near the towns of Roses had to be adjusted after running into opposition from environmentalists.

Pushing the culinary envelope

Plastic reproductions of dishes displayed at the former elBulli restaurant. AFP

Adria pioneered molecular gastronomy, the culinary trend that deconstructs ingredients and recombines them in unexpected ways. The resultant dishes have surprising combinations and textures, such as fruit foam, gazpacho popsicles and caramelised quails.

Under Adria's watch, elBulli achieved the coveted Michelin three-star status. “What we did here was find the limits of what can be done in a gastronomic experience,” the chef said. “What are the physical, mental and even spiritual limits that humans have? And that search paved paths for others.”

Some of the world's most famous chefs were trained by Adria at elBulli, including Denmark's Rene Redzepi of Noma and Italy's Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana and Torno Subito, Dubai, fame.

Adria headed to the white-walled restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean in 1983 for a month-long internship on the recommendation of a friend. He was invited to join the restaurant's staff as a line cook the following year, and became its solo head chef in 1987.

He bought the restaurant in 1990 with his business partner Juli Soler, who passed away in 2015.

“The most important thing that happened to me at elBulli is that I discovered for the first time passion for cuisine,” he said. “At the table, when the staff ate together, we did not talk about football or our weekends, we talked about cuisine.”

The restaurant usually opened only six months a year, to give Adria and his staff time to conceive new dishes. The set menu comprised dozens of small dishes, and cost about €325 at the time the restaurant closed in 2011.

A team of 70 people prepared the meals for the 50 guests who managed to get a reservation.

Why did elBulli close?

Adria said he accepted that his culinary innovations did not please everyone. “In the end, they are new things and it's a shock after the other. It is normal that it makes you reflect on what you like,” he said.

In the final years of the restaurant, demand for reservations was so high that Adria allocated seats mostly through a lottery.

When he decided to close the restaurant, he justified the move saying it “had become a monster”.

“I was very certain that we were right to close. We had reached what we felt was a satisfactory experience at the maximum level.

“And once we reached it, we said: 'Why do we have to continue?'. The mission of elBulli was not this, it was finding the limits.”