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IESE RESEARCH The Recipe for SuccessA leading French chef once told Ferran Adrià: “Creativity is not copying.” Adrià took that prophetic advice to heart and set out to be truly different. As a result, the restaurant with which he has been associated for the past three decades, El Bulli, has become universally lauded as the best restaurant on the planet, and Adrià the celebrated Salvador Dalí of the kitchen. But the journey from humble Costa Brava establishment to Michelin-starred success didn't happen overnight. It has taken decades of solid teamwork and relentless experimentation to get where they are today. It's one thing to say, “Yeah, I too can make paella from Rice Krispies,” but it's quite another to be the first to do it. Adrià and his team concoct dishes that are closer to an artist's process than mere cooking, in what has become known as “technique-concept cuisine,” all based on the premise of exploring the unexplored. One example is blowing up tomatoes with bicycle pumps to see what would happen. The result? Foam, considered one of the great contributions to the culinary world. Another example is an alcoholic cocktail transformed instantly into sorbet in front of your eyes by injecting liquid nitrogen. The Price of Fame: Free? One of Adrià's most brazen rulebreaking claims is that his restaurant business is not profitable, nor does he want it to be. He charges around €200 a head, though could easily command more, and limits seating capacity to only 50 guests per night. Though a million hopefuls write in for a reservation every year, only a few thousand “dining experiences” are granted during the six months out of every year that the restaurant is open. During the other half of the year, Adrià and his team hibernate in a food laboratory near “La Boqueria” market in Barcelona, experimenting like mad scientists with hundreds of new recipes for the following season. “Laboratory” is an accurate description, as they often employ untraditional equipment such as costly pharmaceutical machines meant for producing capsules. His creative team scours the globe in search of new tastes and techniques. Allegedly more culinary concepts have been developed at El Bulli over the past 15 years than in the world over the past century, which is why aspiring chefs everywhere are clambering over each other to work for only room and board in exchange for learning from the masterminds behind the restaurant. Profits certainly do come from the many spinoff operations. El Bulli has spawned a publishing and consulting business, lent its brand to supermarket merchandising and opened several gourmet fast-food outlets as well as a luxury hotel. Yet Adrià regards any business success as the means to buy freedom for more creativity. But could too much co-branding and the democratic giving away of trade secrets – something he actively encourages – eventually undercut his own success Food for Thought Also central to Adrià's philosophy is deconstructionism – taking apart classics and putting them together in surprising new ways with playfulness, irony and spectacle. In this, he is a postmodern pioneer. Yet just as we are seeing the stirrings of post-postmodernism happening in the wider culture, signaled by emerging movements such as Remodernism and the New Sincerity, should El Bulli ride the waves of food purism and return to tradition? More to the point, once you've taken an idea to the nth degree, where do you go next? Could the techniques and processes developed and honed at El Bulli be employed by other innovators and transferred to other industries – such as household goods, education, even driving a car – as Adrià envisions? And to what extent is El Bulli's genius tied to the management team that created the approach? It may have taken El Bulli decades of work to get where it is today, but the recipe for success may need one of Adrià's trademark reinventions if it is to remain at the cutting edge for decades to come. This publication originally appeared in IESE Insight. To read the full article: |
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