Whatever Happemed To.... Ferran Adria?

"We are trying to tell a story through the history of cooking, asking what cooking really is, through the process of cooking."
                              Ferran Adrià
I've blogged about Ferran Adrià and el Bulli before, watched him introduce Anthony Bourdain to a slice of a simple dry cured ham before exploding every concept of what food is, and thought about his deconstruction of food for years. He closed el Bulli a few years ago and kind of drifted off the radar. Now he's back, with an exhibition at Somerset House and is interviewed by Tim Hayward Below (thanks to the Guardian).

 Ferran Adrià, the former head chef at the legendary Catalan restaurant el Bulli, tells Tim Hayward about the exhibition devoted to him at Somerset House in London.

This summer, Somerset House will host a major retrospective exhibition on a global icon of gastronomy, Ferran Adrià, and the restaurant he built to become the world’s best, elBulli. In partnership with Estrella Damm, elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food is the world’s first exhibition dedicated to a chef and his restaurant. The retrospective will showcase the art of cuisine and cuisine as art by taking a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary laboratory and kitchen of the internationally renowned restaurant, which delighted diners in Cala Montjoi, a small picturesque bay on the Catalan coast near Roses, for over 50 years. Charting the evolution of elBulli, the exhibition will feature an in-depth, multimedia display of each of the essential ingredients that make up the culinary creative mastermind of Ferran Adrià and his team: research (handwritten notes and hand-drawn sketches); preparation (plasticine models, which were made for all the dishes served as a means for quality control of colour, portion size and position on the plate, and the specially-designed utensils used); presentation (original tasting menus, cutlery laid on the tables and salivating shots of the creations taken from the catalogue to be published by Phaidon next year), and plaudits (original restaurant reviews and other press clippings).  Combined with archive footage of the chefs and clientele, the exhibition’s ephemera are testament to Adrià’s abundant talent, genius and ambition.