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An Extreme Example
Ferran Adria and his El Bulli team have reinvented haute cuisine with sublime culinary sophistication.
But surprisingly, what really sets this Spanish restaurant apart from other top restaurants are the disciplines they invented and utilized to achieve their goals.
• Goal-setting
Chef Adria set two clear and ambitious innovation goals:
1) Create each year a menu of fundamentally new culinary concepts using new techniques
2) Provide El Bulli customers "three hours of delight."
• Disciplined goal-following
• To make time for sufficient gastronomic experimentation, El Bulli closes for half the year and, to make time for daily concept refinement, no longer serves lunch.
• El Bulli's "development squad" is totally devoted to creating new concepts and techniques, without production cooking duties, working in a separate research center for year-round technique and concept development. The team uses rigorous techniques and copious note-taking to do their work.
• Adria and others on his staff write books and teach courses to codify their cooking from a theoretical point of view, cementing their reputation as innovators in their field, and spreading the adoption of their approach.
• El Bulli published a General Catalogue of all its creations describing them in detail, and dating and numbering each creation. Then, using the catalog, it developed an evolutionary map of the changing parameters in its cuisine to gain perspective on its trajectory.
• It integrates both scientists and product designers into the development of new cuisines
and techniques.
