Ferran Adria Quotes

Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster.

Food is about being happy - at a table, thats probably where we spend most of our happiest hours.

I think my virtue was I never thought "This is impossible.

If you think well, you cook well.

I'm not a materialist, I don't care for things. I don't like cars, I hate things that can be exploited. I live a simple life. The only luxuries I have in my life are travel and food.

Could you imagine people eating a painting - if they could introduce a painting into their bodies? It's probably the artist's dream, and we have the opportunity to do so.

I use the kitchen as a pathway to achieve this happiness.

When people think science and cooking, they have no idea that it's not correctly expressed. We're actually applying the scientific method. People think chemistry and physics are science, but the scientific method is something else.... It's the science that the world of cooking generates: science of butter; science of the croissant.

You need an entire life just to know about tomatoes.

Our kitchen is a kitchen that makes food designed to be tasted with the five senses and it requires concentration to appreciate all that we want to express.

You can't please everyone, especially if you're doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That's life; it's a polemic I've lived with since I started cooking.

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

Salt is the only product that changes cuisine. There's a big difference between food that has salt and food without it. If you don't believe that, ask people who can't eat salt.

What you feel like eating at any given moment is what you should have.

Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food.

I cant live without activity; I cant be sedentary.

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.

For me to go to a restaurant and eat something that is not only good, but totally new, is a double thrill. Double the enjoyment.

The person who's receiving the food cooks as much as the chef. They have a very important role to play... There's no other activity that the person who receives it can destroy the work, can participate in how it's being done. It's emotional. Sometimes journalists are going to have to start talking more about the diners than the chefs.

There is not a good or a bad cuisine, just the one you like the best.

If you go off the edge, it's not cooking anymore, so you have to push it to the limit... What are the limits?

El Bulli was created by 2,000 people that passed through it. And we didn't know that something big was happening. It was like a game in a way. You didn't really know how it was going to end up, and people who would leave, they would take a piece of it with them, but they would leave another piece behind.

People need to understand. If they go to a show on Broadway and find seventy people working but only fifty spectators, how much would the ticket cost? That's what El Bulli's about. There are seventy actors who are playing for just fifty spectators. Is the price expensive? It's relative. How much does a normal dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant cost? Four hundred dollars. It's the same as El Bulli. But you can also think of it this way: How much would it cost to eat something that nobody else is eating?

Risk is to do something that 99 percent of the time would be a failure.

What's wrong with transforming food?

Creativity means not copying.

We opened El Bulli; there were no secrets there. The recipes were not secret. Anybody who came, the recipes were there for them. This was unthinkable then.

I am not a multimillionaire. I dont own a yacht or a Ferrari. I live in a 60-square- metre flat. My needs are simple.

We didnt create dishes. We create preparations to create many dishes.

I had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.

There's so much information that there is disinformation.

There are a lot of products still to be discovered in the world and experimentation, for example with seafood and fish. There are thousands of products that we're not eating right now that maybe will be cultivated in a good agriculture situation, a sustainable, ecological way. Maybe there will be textures or flavors we hadn't even thought of. In the Amazon there are 400 fruits that are not cultivated right now. They're just incredible fruits. Textures, tastes that we don't know right now.

You cannot get an influence from the cuisine of a country if you don't understand it. You've got to study it.

My idol was Johann Cruyff (a Dutch soccer player) and I wanted to be like him. But when I realized that I would never be, I decided to do something else. I met the kitchen by chance and quickly became completely enamoured by it.

People wouldn't think of making avant-garde cuisine at home. When people play basketball at home, they can't play like Michael Jordan.

Throughout the history of el Bulli, there have been many changes in its organisation or philosophy. This is another one of those moments. There will be risk, and freedom, and creativity. But there won't be opening hours, or reservations, or routines.

Like all disciplines where information is shared and work contributes to their advancement, cuisine should be no different. The kitchen is our life, and we are available to share. We want to share our work so that future generations can cook and create a more efficient, easy and unquestionable quality.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

There's a little treat I like a lot called Bollycao. It's like a brioche with chocolate inside, but industrial.

When I go to a fine dining restaurant, I'm excited and I do expect to find proposals to wake my senses.

I don't do my mother's cooking. Because I am a professional and she isn't. Even if she is a better cook.

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

I don't worry about the things I can't change.

You can see it on the Internet now. New society demands that people share their knowledge. It's asking multimillionaires to share their money and creative people to share their creativity. Whoever doesn't share their wealth, be it knowledge, money, or creativity, will be dead.

In my early days, I copied the great French chefs, like most chefs do. Copying is not bad. Copying and not recognizing that you are copying is bad. For me, when I go to a restaurant and am served a dish influenced by something we created at elBulli, if it's well done, it makes me extremely happy.

You may say, "Oh, no. You can't touch a traditional recipe." But we ask: why can't you? Back in 1350, a vinaigrette was a stew, so we ask, why not? This can be applied to any kind of cooking, and that's the shocking part of it. It kind of bends all the traditions. It's a good thing.

We'll work with any designer producing something linked to gastronomy. So a chair for the dining area, a van to move food around. Anything that's connected to the gastronomic process.

In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference.

Friends are really important, especially when you've had the successes that I've had. I've gone really far in my career, so they're the ones that keep you humble, keep your feet on the ground.

It’s very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it’s merely about combining ingredients, but that’s something you can do with your eyes closed.