People need to understand. If they go to a show on Broadway and find seventy people working but only fifty spectators, how much would the ticket cost? That's what El Bulli's about. There are seventy actors who are playing for just fifty spectators. Is the price expensive? It's relative. How much does a normal dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant cost? Four hundred dollars. It's the same as El Bulli. But you can also think of it this way: How much would it cost to eat something that nobody else is eating?
Ferran AdriaWe opened El Bulli; there were no secrets there. The recipes were not secret. Anybody who came, the recipes were there for them. This was unthinkable then.
Ferran AdriaWhen you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I'm not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes.
Ferran AdriaWe need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.
Ferran Adria