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 DECONSTRUCTIVE GASTRONOMY
Final in a three-part series on breaking down food.
Read part 1 or part 2 .
EDITOR'S NOTE: On Feb. 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ferran Adria had decided to permanently close El Bulli, and replace it with a culinary academy.
Ferran Adria's decision to close El Bulli restaurant for two years allows him time to figure out what comes next. Presumably, the chef's $350-per-person tab affords him the funds to support his hiatus, which came as big news a little more than a week ago. It's a perfect time to reflect, as the chef is likely to do. Is anything missing from the innovative cuisine of the deconstructive chefs that he might address? We should not deny them their innovation, creativity, talent, inspiration, knowledge, artistic merit and technical prowess. Even more, there's the laughter that diners experience when confronted with these odd, deconstructed tastes.
Questions remain: Are freeze-dried potato crisps, spherical pearls of olive oil, and infusions of liquid nitrogen and calcium chloride the future of cooking? Does deconstructive cuisine debunk the mystique of haute cuisine or contribute to it? Does it offer the adventurous home-cook or the average diner an invitation to a new adoptable cuisine, or is it virtually unobtainable and un-understandable? On the other hand, is it important to "understand" food at all? Can't it just be enjoyed for what it is? Many of my food writer colleagues and I have eaten some of this deconstructive food and, while very impressed, we find ourselves exclaiming "interesting" or thinking "delicious" but hardly wishing for seconds.
Chef Ferran Adria
Adria is right when he says that cooking is not an art; it's cooking. But there's something paradoxical in that statement, given the nature of his food and his inclusion in the avant-garde art show known as documenta, held in Kassel, Germany. Art critics scoff at the notion that food is art; Adria counters that the critics don't understand what he does. He welcomed the inclusion of his cuisine as art at the show. I don't see the problem in calling what he does cooking and art. Cooking responds to physiological needs, and when you run out of shrimp, no amount of creativity put into cooking will get that shrimp into the pan.
But cooking and eating involve more than the senses. Cookery becomes cuisine when it transcends sustenance and evolves into a codified expression of a culture, with both a producer (the chef) and a consumer (the diner), each of whom appreciates the other and recognizes the nature of this cultural activity. Cuisine is a result of cooking beyond sustenance and acknowledges an emotional component in the act of eating. We need to ask the deconstructive chefs: Where's the comfort in their cooking? Where is the reward and satisfaction in the transformation of raw to cooked? Where is the memory? (In fairness, Adria appreciates the role of memory: "There are two main paths towards attaining harmony of products and flavors," he says. "Through memory (connection with regional cooking traditions, adaptation, deconstruction, former modern recipes), or through new combinations." But is this lip service?
Indictment against deconstructive gastronomy
There's a serious charge made against deconstructive gastronomy, or techno-emotional cuisine -- as it is also described -- and its manipulation and use of chemical additives. Chef Santi Santamaria of Barcelona's Can Fabes, a Michelin 3-star restaurant (as is El Bulli) says that Adria is poisoning his diners. Calcium glunocate and methylcellulose are two additives used in Adria's "spherification" (the chemical process that creates a gel-like skin around a liquid so that it can be formed into a sphere). It has been shown that calcium glunocate has a negative impact on the rate of heartbeat, and the body cannot assimilate methylcellulose. The food of the deconstructive chefs is as processed as food can get. For all the contemporary interest in natural foods, it seems the joke is on us. It's something to consider. Santimaria reproaches his colleagues for their constant pursuit of the vanguard. "We're a gang of frauds who work to distract snobs," he says. "The only truth that matters is the product that comes out of the earth, passes through the ovens to the mouth of the eater, and is then defecated." I find myself philosophically closer to Santamaria than to Adria.
Chef Santi Santamaria
In the future, I wonder whether Adria might focus on what I consider important aspects of the eating and dining experience, aspects often overlooked by avant-garde chefs: memory, context, surroundings. When we eat, we remember; we connect the present experience subconsciously with a previous experience, presumably a comforting or happy one. We eat within a context: for a holiday, with a lover, at a street stall in a foreign country. We eat by the sea, out of a picnic basket, in a cozy restaurant or from a lap-balanced plate watching the Super Bowl. The surroundings may be familiar, or they may be foreign -- a meal with Songhai fishermen on the banks of the Niger River near Timbuktu.
It's context and surroundings that incite our reaction to a meal -- when we leave the pounding surf to rest on the beach and sink our teeth into a humble hot dog with relish, onions, mustard and ketchup, we think, "This is the best thing I've ever eaten." It's why the pizza you ate at Da Michele in Naples will always be the best pizza you've ever eaten. Cultural exchange, appreciation and wonder are rolled up into the delight of discovery and the satisfaction of eating good food in an unexpected place with newly found and most unlikely acquaintances. Experiences like these define what good eating is. They couldn't be further from a deconstructive meal. They are constructive meals.
Beyond the 'wow' of this cutting-edge cuisine
Whether we eat something for the first time in a fit of experimentation or re-experience a dish we've eaten a thousand times, we do so with memories: our experience, our family, our personal catalogue of tastes. Expectation plays a role in our dining experience too; we expect (or at least hope) to eat well. All this is not a criticism of deconstructive gastronomy, whose achievements are important and worthwhile. Rather, it is a reflection on ways of criticizing and understanding cuisine with more depth and appreciation than our taste buds alone can provide.
We desire to say more about Leonardo da Vinci than that his painting is "pretty," and we want to say more about a dish than it is "yummy." Deconstructive gastronomy is a movement that wows us. It's fascinating, and there's nothing wrong with its cutting-edge quality. But as a lover of good food, as someone who finds joy in cooking, I don't necessarily want my food to be philosophical. I'm most satisfied when something I eat has that ineluctable quality that I can't write about. I just eat and I don't reflect. Now there's the paradox! Because we always end up reflecting.
Clifford A. Wright won the James Beard / KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year award and the James Beard Award for the Best Writing on Food in 2000 for "A Mediterranean Feast."
Top photo of Adria's "spherical egg of white asparagus with false truffle," by Francesc Guillamet, El Bulli.
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