My brother-in-law, an aspiring chef, recently gave us A Day at eBulli as a gift. The book is photo journal day in the life of this famous restaurant. To be honest it took me a while to pick it up. It quite literally weighs a ton, and the cover wrap that proclaimed “Best chef in the world” and “Best restaurant in the world” had me put off a bit.
What I expected to see what narcissistic food porn, but was surprised to find a story of authenticity, innovation and creativity disguised as a coffee table book.
EBulli is a restaurant nestled in the hills just outside Barcelona. They received about two million reservation requests per year for only eight thousand available places. For such an exclusive list the price is relatively affordable: €250 per guest including drinks.
The restaurant is open only six months out of the year. The other six months are spent innovating and experimenting with new techniques and ingredients. The team there has created special tools for cooking and preparing food, such as dipping a mould into liquid nitrogen and then into a coconut cream. All of this experimenting is meticulously documented and even shared with the world at large in the true spirit of open source.
New dishes are tested with friends and gradually integrated into the menu. Customer feedback actually plays an integral role into the perfection of dishes - both throughout the season and even in the course of night. Guests are served a preset menu of between twenty eight and thirty five dishes presented in three “acts” and served in three locations throughout the evening.
The book has several interstitials that go into more detail about their creative philosophy, and their commitment to quality and innovation.
“With creativity, it’s not what you look for that matters, but what you find.”
“A creative person tries to do what they don’t know how to do.”
I’m sure there’s a little lost in the translation, but you get the idea.
After twenty years of experimentation, head chef Ferran Adrià has broken down their experimentation process into various structures that they call “creative methods”. Creative Method II contains these guiding principles: association, inspiration, adaptation, deconstruction, minimalism, changes to the structure of the menu, the search for new ingredients.
It’s quite amazing how these creative methods translate to many other creative disciplines and provide an interesting blueprint for innovation. And with food being a universal connector the leap is easy to make.
This video from The Food Network gives a good “taste” of the the customer experience.