Review: El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

Unless one is a one-percenter who drives a Bentley and routinely summers in Gascony, the avant-garde cuisine served at legendary Spanish restaurant El Bulli probably smells like the embodiment of outlandish extravagance. Priced to convey exclusivity and prepared with an almost fanatical regard for presentation, head chef Ferran Adrià’s cutting-edge offerings suggest a culinary cousin to the provocative conceptual fashions that appear on Parisian runways. Simply put, the ordinary is not welcome in Adrià’s presence. The success of German director Gereon Wetzel’s new documentary feature, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, rests on the film’s serious-minded engagement with the now-shuttered restaurant’s aesthetic ethos, a philosophy that valued the wondrous and unexpected. Accordingly, the film-makers steadfastly resist any urge to mock El Bulli’s unconventional cuisine or dismiss its ferocious devotion to an inimitable dining experience. Cooking in Progress observes one of the restaurant’s last operational years with negligible editorial comment, admiring the sensory splendor of El Bulli’s menu and the awesome logistical ballet of its operation with quiet awe. The film’s unassuming yet exhilarating documentation of culinary innovation serves as an essential cinematic remedy to the soapy freak-show of most reality television kitchens.

Director Wetzel and his crew smoothly envelop themselves within the world of El Bulli for the duration of the restaurant’s 2008-2009 season. Open for just six months out of the year, the restaurant closes for the remaining six so that Adrià and his chefs can retreat to their test kitchen in Barcelona to develop the upcoming season’s menu. This commitment to gastronomic originality and experimentation had its price: El Bulli hemorrhaged money, and was financed largely through the sale of branded books and Adrià’s line of kitchen products. The restaurant eventually closed for the last time in 2011. This disheartening context is absent from the film, but it nonetheless underlines Adrià’s borderline-religious devotion to the food experience, an outlook which Cooking in Progress gracefully conveys and embraces.

The establishment’s culinary values are apparent from the film’s opening, which patiently observes as chefs Oriel Castro and Eduard Xatruch arrive at the test kitchen to mull over proposals. Ingredients and processes are uttered as though they were enchanted words, each with a question mark. Sweet potato? Champignon? Hazelnut? Deep-fried? Dehydrated? Jellied? Gradually, themes for the upcoming season begin to take shape, and Adrià arrives to taste this, that, and then this again in a slightly different preparation. “Don’t give me anything that doesn’t taste good,” he commands. The chefs assemble dozens of color printouts depicting test dishes into a grid, shuffling and rating them into something resembling a coherent menu. Suddenly, the six-month sabbatical that once seemed excessive now feels frantically short. Opening day draws closer, and the chefs migrate back to the restaurant to begin training a small army of kitchen and dining room staff for the new season’s multifarious demands.

Director Wetzel discerns that his tale’s intrinsic drama and beauty emerge without much coaxing, provided he just stays out of the way. The film presents El Bulli’s saga in a clean, observational style, abstaining from narration, interviews, or effects-laden explanatory sequences. Cooking in Progress’ approach is to simply watch—attentively, lovingly—as the art of gastronomy is practiced at its most refined and demanding level. The histrionics and backbiting one might expect from a restaurant documentary are nowhere to be found. The only real moment of canned drama occurs when Adrià’s exasperation flares following a computer hard drive crash, a disaster that swallows a week’s worth of menu work. The film reveals that the head chef can be high-handed at times, but also far too thoughtful and scrupulous to heap abusive profanity on his employees like some Iberian Gordon Ramsay. The food remains ever at the center of the El Bulli cosmos.

With its deep bells and ceaselessly muttering percussion, the film’s whimsical yet minimalist score by Stephan Diethelm creates the sensation of simmering alchemical discovery. Indeed, Wetzel establishes a lovely, sustained mood of modernist magic throughout the film’s duration. Even the most unadventurous meat-and-potatoes-loving viewer will likely find themselves beguiled by the infectious excitement that surrounds El Bulli’s culinary endeavors. Each season, each night, and each dish is revealed as a creative achievement, a whirl of industrial production and elegant theater that elicits gapes and gasps. The film concludes with a succession of luscious still images cataloging the season’s three dozen or so creations: tea shrimp with caviar anemones; ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive; rabbit brain in its ragout; coconut sponge; bone marrow tartar with oysters; vanishing ravoli. Seeing these arcane gastronomic wonders so arrayed, after witnessing the entire year devoted to their creation and introduction, leaves little doubt about what they comprise: a work of art.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.