Quotes from Ferran Adria

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

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.

elBulli isn't me. elBulli is the people who have eaten there, the people that have passed through the kitchen, and the people that have written about it. Every person has inserted their little bit of sand, their way of understanding the world, in that place so that it could exist. So they're not disciples or sons -- if they are anything, they're brothers.

When a customer receives a dish, they get food and design at the same time.

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.

There's so much information that there is disinformation.

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.

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

If I don't have pressure, I don't function.

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.

What's left for culinary innovation? We keep going. The vanguard isn't over.

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.

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

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.

What I am most proud of, is that today, I see that the values and spirit of what grew in the kitchen at elBulli are present in so many kitchens and places around the world today.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A chef is a chef, a cook is a cook; a lorry driver is a lorry driver and a designer is a designer. I've never heard anyone say that Philippe Starck is a chef. The important thing is dialogue. If I said to Norman Foster that he was a chef he'd say "No", but he might have a dialogue with chefs. People have said to me for many years that I'm not a chef and that I'm an artist instead, but I always say, "No, I'm a chef." I just have dialogues with designers.

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

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

Chefs have only been able to work in restaurants, high-end cuisine. Why? Why haven't they been able to find other scenarios? For those chefs who want to do avant-garde cuisine, should they be finding their income in a restaurant? These are the kind of questions we are asking ourselves. So the new scenario will allow them to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it.