What's wrong with transforming food?

It’s very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it’s merely about combining ingredients, but that’s something you can do with your eyes closed.

The person who's receiving the food cooks as much as the chef. They have a very important role to play... There's no other activity that the person who receives it can destroy the work, can participate in how it's being done. It's emotional. Sometimes journalists are going to have to start talking more about the diners than the chefs.

I had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.

A chef is a chef, a cook is a cook; a lorry driver is a lorry driver and a designer is a designer. I've never heard anyone say that Philippe Starck is a chef. The important thing is dialogue. If I said to Norman Foster that he was a chef he'd say "No", but he might have a dialogue with chefs. People have said to me for many years that I'm not a chef and that I'm an artist instead, but I always say, "No, I'm a chef." I just have dialogues with designers.

El Bulli was created by 2,000 people that passed through it. And we didn't know that something big was happening. It was like a game in a way. You didn't really know how it was going to end up, and people who would leave, they would take a piece of it with them, but they would leave another piece behind.

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.