Ferran Adria Quotations

I have a drivers licence, but the truth is that I hardly ever drive. I prefer to get around by taxi.

I don't dream at night; life has given me the stuff I need to be able to dream during the day. I'm very lucky.

For me to go to a restaurant and eat something that is not only good, but totally new, is a double thrill. Double the enjoyment.

I don't worry about the things I can't change.

I never even dreamed of being a chef, and that's fundamental.

Chefs have only been able to work in restaurants, high-end cuisine. Why? Why haven't they been able to find other scenarios? For those chefs who want to do avant-garde cuisine, should they be finding their income in a restaurant? These are the kind of questions we are asking ourselves. So the new scenario will allow them to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it.

I was 18 when I first started working at a restaurant. I was a dishwasher. I only got the job because I wanted to go to Ibiza for vacation, and washing dishes was the only job I could find.

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

I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical.

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.

I am not a multimillionaire. I don't own a yacht or a Ferrari. I live in a 60-square- metre flat. My needs are simple.

When I was a teenager, my idol was the Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff. He's the only person I've ever asked for an autograph.

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.

I cant live without activity; I cant be sedentary.

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

Why not mix this and that? If soy goes well with fish, how come no one does beef carpaccio with soy? Why do we have such a taste and not another? It's all about culture. There is something, however, that I really don't like: bell peppers.

In a city, it's very hard to do a restaurant, an avant-garde-cuisine restaurant, where each year you need to change the whole menu.

I wanted to take nouvelle cuisine further, to the point where we were breaking down the essence of taste and sensation, reconfiguring food as a series of really intense hits on the tongue.

If a child plays sport early in childhood, and doesn't give it up, he will play sport for the rest of his life. And if children have a connection with, and are involved in the preparation of, the food they eat, then it will be normal for them to cook these kind of meals, and they will go on cooking them for the rest of their lives.

I believe that if you eat well, you work even better.

There are many cultural prejudices. For instance, even though fresh fish is a regional staple, Catalans don't like sashimi.

We never have business meals at El Bulli. If it's about business, you're probably not paying much attention to the food.

Ferran Adria making hamburgers... some thought it was crazy. But getting them perfect was a challenge. Plus I'm fascinated by all aspects of food.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

Monkeys don't enjoy or appreciate flavours. Experts have told us that human beings are the only beings that can appreciate food at this higher level and the only living beings that cook.

When we're ill, one of the last things we have that we can enjoy is food.

When people arrive at El Bulli, everybody goes through the kitchen. It's a way of making them feel at home. When they leave, the only thing I ask is whether they've been happy. Everything in between, I don't particularly care.

If I were a customer, and I was given a dish with peppers, I would hate it. I also don't like blood sausage.

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?

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.

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.

In more day-to-day restaurants, things have undergone a seismic change towards informality and sharing, which has been years in the making. Nowadays, people don't want just one dish; they want to order lots of things and they want to do it in fun places, places that give them an experience. The experience that a restaurant needs to offer is no longer just based around the food.

In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference.

I don't do my mother's cooking. Because I am a professional and she isn't. Even if she is a better cook.

My idol was Johann Cruyff (a Dutch soccer player) and I wanted to be like him. But when I realized that I would never be, I decided to do something else. I met the kitchen by chance and quickly became completely enamoured by it.

We'll work with any designer producing something linked to gastronomy. So a chair for the dining area, a van to move food around. Anything that's connected to the gastronomic process.

You may say, "Oh, no. You can't touch a traditional recipe." But we ask: why can't you? Back in 1350, a vinaigrette was a stew, so we ask, why not? This can be applied to any kind of cooking, and that's the shocking part of it. It kind of bends all the traditions. It's a good thing.

I never cook at home. After 15 hours at work, I don't have much of a desire to cook at home. I do eat at home, but it's always something simple. Raw nuts. Almonds, hazelnuts, pine nuts--these are marvelous products. I am, however, the type that likes to go out to eat a lot. I never tire of it.

I don't have a favorite cooking tool. In the kitchen, I always have my pencil and notebook in my hand. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical. The pencil has a symbolic meaning for me. The type of person who carries a pencil around is the type of person who's open to change. Someone who walks around with a pen isn't; he's the opposite.

If I don't have pressure, I don't function.

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.

When a customer receives a dish, they get food and design at the same time.

In my early days, I copied the great French chefs, like most chefs do. Copying is not bad. Copying and not recognizing that you are copying is bad. For me, when I go to a restaurant and am served a dish influenced by something we created at elBulli, if it's well done, it makes me extremely happy.

When 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.

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.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

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.

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

Like all disciplines where information is shared and work contributes to their advancement, cuisine should be no different. The kitchen is our life, and we are available to share. We want to share our work so that future generations can cook and create a more efficient, easy and unquestionable quality.

What's wrong with transforming food?

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

Creativity means not copying.

When people think science and cooking, they have no idea that it's not correctly expressed. We're actually applying the scientific method. People think chemistry and physics are science, but the scientific method is something else.... It's the science that the world of cooking generates: science of butter; science of the croissant.

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.

People wouldn't think of making avant-garde cuisine at home. When people play basketball at home, they can't play like Michael Jordan.

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

We didnt create dishes. We create preparations to create many dishes.

There's so much information that there is disinformation.

We 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.

You cannot get an influence from the cuisine of a country if you don't understand it. You've got to study it.

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

I'm not a materialist, I don't care for things. I don't like cars, I hate things that can be exploited. I live a simple life. The only luxuries I have in my life are travel and food.

There's a little treat I like a lot called Bollycao. It's like a brioche with chocolate inside, but industrial.

I am not a multimillionaire. I dont own a yacht or a Ferrari. I live in a 60-square- metre flat. My needs are simple.

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.

I use the kitchen as a pathway to achieve this happiness.

You need an entire life just to know about tomatoes.

If you go off the edge, it's not cooking anymore, so you have to push it to the limit.... What are the limits?

What you feel like eating at any given moment is what you should have.

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.

There is not a good or a bad cuisine, just the one you like the best.

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.

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.

If you think well, you cook well.

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?

Salt is the only product that changes cuisine. There's a big difference between food that has salt and food without it. If you don't believe that, ask people who can't eat salt.

I think my virtue was I never thought "This is impossible.

Could you imagine people eating a painting -- if they could introduce a painting into their bodies? It's probably the artist's dream, and we have the opportunity to do so.

Food is about being happy -- at a table, thats probably where we spend most of our happiest hours...

Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster.