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?

There are a lot of products still to be discovered in the world and experimentation, for example with seafood and fish. There are thousands of products that we're not eating right now that maybe will be cultivated in a good agriculture situation, a sustainable, ecological way. Maybe there will be textures or flavors we hadn't even thought of. In the Amazon there are 400 fruits that are not cultivated right now. They're just incredible fruits. Textures, tastes that we don't know right now.

Creativity means not copying.

We 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.

Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food.

When I go to a fine dining restaurant, I'm excited and I do expect to find proposals to wake my senses.

Risk is to do something that 99 percent of the time would be a failure.