Molecular Mourning

If you’re not one of the privileged few to have eaten at elBulli, looks like you’re out of luck. Ferran Adria has decided to close the world’s most prestigious restaurant in order to start a culinary academy.

He told The Wall Street Journal at that time that his research would “be focused on sustaining and growing our brand however possible. A brand with goals like ours requires a big capital investment.’’

On Friday he said he decided to close the restaurant for good because he and his partner, Juli Soler, had been losing a half million Euros a year on the restaurant and his cooking workshop in Barcelona.

I remember having a debate about whether Adria was a shrewd businessman or not, and I was firmly in the former camp. This move has left me terribly confused. The acclaim that he garnered with the restaurant wasn’t the sort of thing competing chefs could just replicate. Through luck, skill, or both, he had the perfect location, an outstanding staff, a revolving door of incredible sous chefs (willing to work for free!), and an unmatched mystique. The restaurant was worth every bit of those half million dollars, and Adria’s other ventures benefited tremendously from El Bulli’s existence. It would be a shame if he thought it had to be a profit center.

Is his brand cemented to the point that he didn’t need elBulli? Will the culinary academy create the same mystique? I suppose those are his bets, and I’m not optimistic. It won’t take too many Ferran Adria-designed Lay’s Potato Chips to destroy the elBulli halo. And considering the size of elBulli’s waiting list, why not just do the obvious … raise the price? Consider me puzzled.

Advertisement