Friends are really important, especially when you've had the successes that I've had. I've gone really far in my career, so they're the ones that keep you humble, keep your feet on the ground.

We knew the time would come that we'd have to step down because we'd been winning Oscars for 15 years. I discovered this one day when I got home, my mother was reading a newspaper and she said, 'Again? What are you doing in the papers?' And I realized if my mother thought that of me, what would my enemies think?

You can't please everyone, especially if you're doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That's life; it's a polemic I've lived with since I started cooking.

Our kitchen is a kitchen that makes food designed to be tasted with the five senses and it requires concentration to appreciate all that we want to express.

You can see it on the Internet now. New society demands that people share their knowledge. It's asking multimillionaires to share their money and creative people to share their creativity. Whoever doesn't share their wealth, be it knowledge, money, or creativity, will be dead.

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?

Throughout the history of el Bulli, there have been many changes in its organisation or philosophy. This is another one of those moments. There will be risk, and freedom, and creativity. But there won't be opening hours, or reservations, or routines.