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Albert Adrià: “Everything fits into our NON-philosophy”
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Albert Adrià returns to present his concept in Enigma once again in San Sebastián Gastronomika, where priority is given to the product and to the style of having no style.
“I love listening to chefs’ lectures, because it’s just as important to talk about how you cook, as it is to cook how you talk. I am not worried about the new generations, but I am concerned about their discourse when defending their cuisine”, assures the younger Adriá, who came to Donostia to defend his discourse for the second consecutive year. “Congresses act as therapy or as a reflection; last year I explained what Enigma was, but after being open for 15 months my ideas have completely changed. I only open in the evenings, I offer a tasting menu which includes no finger food, I cook above all for foreigners and I do not make neighbourhood haute cuisine. I don’t even take notice of what I say”, he joked.
What he does have very clear is his passion, which he classifies as an obsession, for quality and the seasonality of the product, and for endless creative freedom. “I don’t want to tell a story nor do I want to create a philosophy: I’m looking for a style which hasn’t arrived yet, and meanwhile I enjoy cooking again”, he recognises. He claims to not have a creative system, but operates by using the theory of ideas, the moment, of starting from scratch. “My creative system is a cloud, that mutates, it comes together with other clouds or disappears after a storm”, he explained. He does recognise that he is interested in essentiality, not distorting his view to what shouldn’t be, and prioritises the essential over the unusual, above all “when the explanation of a dish leaves no doubt. Emotion should be achieved through the essentiality of the flavour, for which we should decipher its DNA” he argued.
The ingenious and nonconformist Albert Adrià finds his expressive language through a tasting menu which changes several times a year according to the seasonality of the products, by constituting a global ensemble which summarises his creative anarchy. Today he brought three dishes from Enigma to the congress kitchen such as a gelification of green coconut with caviar, accompanied by a sheet of tender green coconut painted with ham fat, and a touch of thyme and lemon; a mozzarella soufflé, “a recipe, the result of when the muse visits you”, prepared from mozzarella whey, hot foam, albumin, xanthan and fish tail, a steak tartar with ox from Burgos converted into fresh sobrassada prepared on the spot, served on his light air-filled pancake.