When I spoke with Albert Adrià, he was chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona. The book notes that he has since become chef of Enigma. He appears in five chapters, and in three of them he supplies the sentence the chapter is built around.
Adrià speaks to the calling that arrives by the back door. He entered the kitchen at El Bulli at fifteen with no interest in cuisine. His brother Ferran was head chef and needed cooks, so he went because the family needed him to go. He worked, ate and slept at the restaurant for two years, moved from station to station and ended up in the bakery, drawn to the level of knowledge and technique a good baker requires. He speaks to the creative process as something with a structure underneath its apparent disorder, which he compares to assembling a car around a chassis. He speaks to the discipline of experimenting in the development kitchen and never with customers. And he speaks to endurance, in two sentences that give the last chapters of the book their argument.
“Experiments are necessary to make mistakes, and that is the key lesson. You don’t experiment with customers.” Albert Adrià, then chef, Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
In the book, Albert Adrià appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, where his resistance at fifteen is the first of the stories about a craft that had already decided about the person; in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, where José Andrés’s account of the same El Bulli kitchen places the young Adrià on his way from the back door to the bakery; in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, where his description of the chef’s pipeline and his claim that creativity is tied to emptiness are the chapter’s clearest statements; in Chapter 11, Staying True, where his line about staying pure while trying to evolve names the two disciplines the chapter asks operators to hold at once; and in Chapter 13, The Long Game, where passion and humbleness are the two words that keep a person in the work for decades.
“The key is to stay as pure as possible while trying to evolve.” Albert Adrià, then chef, Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona