Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

and we chatted for a while before I asked where they were headed. “A restaurant called elBulli,” Wylie said. “Have you heard of it?”

I hitched a ride with them on their posh tour bus.

When I arrived at elBulli with the American chefs I felt like a leech. After all, I was an unknown, uninvited sous chef there to work, not to be wined and dined. None of them had ever heard of me. The elBulli co-owner and maître d’hôtel, Juli Soler, welcomed the group at the door, along with the Spanish government official who was leading the tour. I pulled him aside and explained my story. He told Juli who I was and walked off to the kitchen to tell chef Adrià that I had arrived with the group.

“Ferran wants you to eat with them,” he said. Well, now I really felt like a parasite, but thought to myself, “If you insist.”

I sheepishly joined the group for dinner. Despite being uncomfortable with the chefs, I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity. I would just lay low, stay quiet, and pay attention.

I had, at this point, been cooking for twenty of my twenty-five years. I had literally grown up in restaurants. I had graduated from a top cooking school and worked as a sous chef in one of the best restaurants in the world. I thought I knew food and cooking.

I had no idea what we were in for. None of us did.

The dishes started to come out, and I was disoriented, surprised, and amazed. Completely blown away.

Trout roe arrived, encased in a thin, perfect tempura batter. I shot Wylie a skeptical glance and he immediately returned it. You simply don’t deep-fry roe. You can’t. It isn’t possible.

We popped the gumball-sized bite into our mouths. There was no obvious binder holding the eggs together, and they were still cold and uncooked! How did they hold the eggs together and then dip them into a batter without dispersing them into hundreds of pieces? And how are they uncooked? Whoa.

A small bowl arrived. “Ah, polenta with olive oil,” I thought. “This isn’t so out there. This I can understand.” But as soon as the spoon entered my mouth an explosion of yellow corn flavor burst, and then all the texture associated with polenta vanished. I laid my spoon down and stared at it with mock calm. I was astonished.

What the hell was going on back there? This is the stuff of magic.

On it went. Pea soup changed temperature as I ate it. Ravioli made from cuttlefish instead of pasta burst with a liquid coconut filling as soon as I closed my mouth. Tea showed up looking like a mound of bubbles but immediately dissolved on my palate. Braised rabbit arrived with a hot apple gelatin. How is that possible? Gelatin can’t be hot! That much I knew for sure. Hell, my mom taught me that.

The meal went on for forty courses—over five and a half hours. It was, quite simply, mind-altering.

Still, I walked into the elBulli kitchen the next day expecting some familiarity. A kitchen is a kitchen, right? Chefs were coming from all over the world to learn this new style of cooking, yet it didn’t feel like cooking at all. “Concepts” better described the dishes. There were no flaming burners in this kitchen, no proteins sizzling in oil, no veal stock simmering on the flattop. This was like landing on Mars.

I saw cooks using tools as though they were jewelers. Chefs huddled over a project such as wrapping young pine nuts in thin sheets of sliced beet or using syringes to precisely fill miniature hollowed-out recesses in strawberries with Campari. Everything was new and strange to me: the way the team was organized, the techniques being used, the sights, even the smells. Here was a new cuisine where nothing was routine.

René Redzepi from Copenhagen, who spoke French and English, was given the task of being my ears and voice during the stay. I didn’t speak any Spanish. So an elBulli chef de cuisine would speak in Spanish to an Italian chef, who would translate to a French guy who would pass on the instructions to René. René would then pass along what was left of the initial conversation to me in English.

I spent just three days in the kitchen of elBulli, but it sent me home reeling.

I knew that quickly that I still had much to learn.

I arrived back at The French Laundry to find myself working the canapé station, filling a spot vacated by a cook who was fired while I was gone.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the elBulli trip. The idea of letting my imagination be the guiding source of inspiration had resonated with me for a long time, but now the urge to create outside of The French Laundry became irresistible.

A few days later, chef Hiro Sone from Terra restaurant in St. Helena was coming in to dine. We always tried to come up with a few twists for visiting chefs, especially ones we knew well and appreciated. I looked over at chef Keller and said, “How about a foamed lobster broth in between the canapé progression?”

Thomas looked at me oddly, as if he dreaded the day I would want to implement some of the techniques I saw at elBulli, but knew it was coming. Suggesting such a thing at The French Laundry bordered on heresy. It was not under the Laundry umbrella, and I certainly did not want to insult chef Keller or compromise his style. But I was so incredibly inspired and excited by what I saw at elBulli that I wanted the other chefs to learn about it and feel the same way.

Chef Keller heard me out. “The flavors will be classic French Laundry, Chef,” I said. “It will be delicious. We will simply take our exact lobster base, put it in an ISI canister, and aerate it over some classic garnishes in a glass. It should come out part soufflé,