El bulli the taste of innovation case study

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Appetite for Innovation

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Appetite for Innovation

Creativity and Change at elBulli

M. Pilar Opazo

Columbia University Press / New York

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-231-54163-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Opazo, M. Pilar (Maria Pilar), author. Title: Appetite for innovation : creativity and change at elBulli / M. Pilar Opazo. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical

references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016006100 | ISBN 9780231176781 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231176798

(pbk.) | ISBN 9780231541633 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: elBulli (Restaurant)—History. | Business incubators. | Organizational

change. | Creative destruction. Classification: LCC TX945.5.E44 O63 2016 | DDC 647.95068—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016006100

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To Jose and Amanda …and the little one on his way

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Context and Vision

2 From Chaos to Order: elBulli’s System of Continuous Innovation

3 Diffusion and Institutionalization of Innovation

4 The Bittersweet Taste of Relentless Innovation

5 Cooking Up a New Organization

Conclusion

Notes

References

Appendix

Index

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Acknowledgments

Just as mobilizing newness is not a solitary enterprise, the development of this book was the result of a series of efforts and contributions of many people who helped me move forward. Without their support and advice, this book would simply not have been possible.

My mentors at Columbia University provided great inspiration, encouragement, and advice that shaped my research throughout. I am immensely grateful to my advisor, Peter Bearman, for his great generosity, sharp ideas, and careful guidance. People who visited me at my office were surprised to see three Post-its that I had next to my computer, and which guided my writing: “Have fun,” “Pick up flowers,” “Think crazy and wild!” Three comments that, in fact, summarized Peter’s latest feedback. My conversations with him offered both intellectual stimulation and happiness throughout the entire process of developing this book.

My mentor Diane Vaughan introduced me to the richness of ethnographic work; she encouraged my care for details and the depth of my theoretical analyses. I am deeply indebted to her for her insightful and constructive comments at each step of this process, and for her keen (and often contagious) sense of humor. I am also very thankful to Priscilla Ferguson for her enthusiasm in my project from the very start. Her great knowledge of the sociology of gastronomy and cultural studies was very important in shaping this book. The many conversations that I had with Diane and Priscilla over good food or coffee will become “food rituals” by the time this manuscript is published.

I am also very grateful to David Stark for introducing me to the fascinating “world” of innovation and its connection with organizing and organizations. Conversations at his Center for Organizational Innovation (COI) at Columbia University have played an important role in my research since its very early stages. Finally, the “creative chaos” that emerged from my interactions with Harrison White was highly influential in my work. I hope that this book can reflect, at

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least in part, the valuable advice that I obtained from each one of them and the privilege of having them as my mentors.

In developing this book, I was fortunate to work closely with Darío Rodríguez and Ramón Sangüesa. Ever since I was an undergraduate student, Darío has not only read everything that I have written (including quite unpolished versions of this book), he has also fostered my sociological imagination in ways that I would never have expected. I am very proud to say that he continues to be my dear friend and mentor to this day. Ramón joined me in many of the adventures involved in this research and was a constant source of positive energy behind my work. I am very thankful for the opportunities he has given me and for all the doors that he has helped me open.

This research was supported by a Fulbright grant and by a grant from the Technical University of Catalonia (#C08505) awarded by Telefónica Digital. I am deeply indebted to Pablo Rodríguez for his constant support and relevant comments at various stages of this investigation, and also to Oriol Lloret, María José Tomé, and Lars Stalling for their continuous encouragement and insightful suggestions. Telefónica Digital provided me with a stimulating space to write while I was in Barcelona and to present my ideas when they were still under development. I am extremely grateful for this.

In the final stages of my project, I had the opportunity to be part of the Mellon Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center of Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), Columbia University. I also helped form and joined the Initiative for the Study and Practice of Organized Creativity and Culture (ISPOCC) at the Columbia Business School. The lively dialogues that I shared with these groups greatly inspired this book. In this respect, I am particularly thankful to William McAllister and Damon Phillips for their kind mentorship and constant support.

Friends and colleagues made this book a better one by providing substantive intellectual and practical support. Special thanks to Constanza Miranda for writing with me and for pushing me to search for the unknown; to Consuelo del Canto and Diana del Olmo for accompanying me at all stages; and to Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales for the countless phone conversations that we had about my work. Many thanks to Fabien Accominotti for sharing his great knowledge of the art worlds with me and for

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always being open to discuss new ideas, even if they were largely unrelated to his work. Thanks to Ifeoma Ajunwa, Juan and Jean Capello, Alfonso Cruz, Daniel Fridman, Carmen Gloria Larenas, Federico Leighton, Anna Mitschele, Kristin Murphy, Olivia Nicole, Trinidad Vidal, and Anna Zamora for their friendship and advice at various stages of this book. My foodie friends, Michael Nixon and Naja Stamer, read earlier drafts of the chapters and gave me comments when I much needed them. Thanks to Adriana Freitas for our long walks in Barcelona, and to Laia Sanchis for offering me a wonderful place to stay. The help of Katie Kashkett and Deanna Villanueva significantly improved this book by incorporating their editorial skills into this project, for which I am extremely grateful. Special thanks to Patricia Yagüe for making this a fun project by introducing her design skills into it, and for stimulating many creative sparks that are part of this book. Finally, my conversations with Dora Arenas during my coffee breaks provided much inspiration and joy to my otherwise lonely days of writing.

I am enormously grateful to Ferran Adrià and the elBulli team, and to each one of my respondents for being generous and curious enough to contribute to my research and, ultimately, to make it happen. My gratitude also goes to two anonymous reviewers at Columbia University Press for their insightful readings of an earlier manuscript and for their helpful and inspiring comments and criticisms.

Last but not least, I want to thank my family, and the love of my life, Jose. My dad, Eduardo Opazo, was the first to encourage me to contact elBulli, and he later read successive drafts that kept pushing me forward. My mother, Maite Bretón, was always there for me to talk about my work, and in doing so, she brightened (and continues to brighten) each one of my days. My sisters Magdalena and Maite greatly contributed to this book by engaging in active discussions about my ideas while they were still being cooked. My husband, Jose, has been my companion in every step of this process and my greatest source of inspiration and love. Jose, tú eres el motor de mis sueños. I dedicate this book to him and to our daughter, Amanda, who recently arrived to transform our lives when we thought that things could not get any better.

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Introduction

The backstage view of one of the world’s most intriguing restaurants looked like perfectly organized chaos. In elBulli’s kitchen, more than forty cooks coordinated in almost seamless ways to prepare a menu of thirty to forty courses that would be served that night, one of the last nights of the elBulli restaurant’s existence. On one side of the large kitchen, two head chefs were working on something that looked like a big balloon covered by a thin, white membrane. And, on the other side, an apprentice made small spheres and later dropped them with a spoon in a yellowish liquid. At the kitchen’s center was Ferran Adrià, elBulli’s chef and co-owner. Rather than supervising the cooking process, however, Adrià was insistently making notes and diagrams in several documents that were spread out on the bar and on a wooden table next to the kitchen. Supposedly, this is also where Adrià sat at least twice a week to test the consistency of elBulli’s menu. By the time of my visit, Adrià had already announced the unusual decision to close his successful restaurant to build a new research center for innovation under the name of “elBulli Foundation.”

As I watched how this scene unfolded, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. While a diner would probably have remarked on the meticulous preparation involved in each of elBulli’s “magical recipes,” from a sociological perspective, I was most intrigued by those seemingly insignificant yet systematic actions that make an organization’s production of innovation possible. I knew that in the last decades, elBulli and Adrià had not only created new food preparations, they had also become a key driving force behind the establishment of a new movement in the gastronomic field,1 often interchangeably called molecular, techno-emotional, or experimental cuisine by the mass media. Years earlier, along with Chefs Heston Blumenthal from Fat Duck, Thomas Keller from French Laundry and Per Se, and Harold McGee, who has written seminal books on the topic of science and cooking, Adrià had published a statement in the newspaper, The Guardian, advancing

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the principles of a “new cookery.” This approach, he announced, proposed culinary innovation in the form of new techniques, equipment, and new information in general, while building on the conventional knowledge of gastronomy.2 By the time of my visit to the elBulli restaurant, Adrià and elBulli’s presence was so significant in the gastronomic landscape that many chefs who were at the top of the culinary rankings had been trained in elBulli’s kitchen.

Further, by then anyone familiar with the latest trends in fine dining would know that, from 1997 to 2011, the elBulli restaurant had received the coveted recognition of three Michelin stars; and it had been declared the Best Restaurant in the World for an unprecedented five times by Restaurant Magazine, another influential culinary ranking. It was also common knowledge that interested diners would wait for years to be able to eat at elBulli. Roughly two million people wrote an e-mail every November to ask for a reservation at the restaurant, but only 8,000 diners got to eat there every season.3 The level of exclusivity at this restaurant seemed simply impossible in practice.

In some way, I had experienced this extreme exclusivity myself. In 2007, after six years of waiting, my parents received an e-mail offering them the opportunity to dine at this acclaimed restaurant. Months in advance, they had planned their vacation so as to drive from Madrid, where they lived at that time, all the way up to Cala Montjoi, the natural reserve in the province of Girona, Catalonia, where the elBulli restaurant is located. While in my home country, Chile, I remember receiving pictures of them sitting at one of the tables in the restaurant’s terrace, just a few steps above the beach, ready to start their meals. Back then, the food being served looked indeed quite intriguing, at least to the eyes of an outsider. As my mother said when she described one of the dishes that she had that night: “It was like an edible gold brooch… but one that exploded in your mouth while you were eating it!” Despite the restaurant’s beautiful location and how stimulating the food was purported to be, back then I could not stop wondering how it was possible for reservations at a restaurant to be in such high demand, or for that matter, why potential clients would wait for years to be chosen to dine there. What was it about this restaurant elBulli? What was its secret?

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By the time of the restaurant’s closure in 2011, it had also become unbelievably competitive for culinary professionals to work at elBulli as unpaid interns or apprentices. Every year 3,000 highly trained professionals from all over the world applied for a slot as a stagiaire, but only thirty or so were accepted. Part of the difficulty of getting a position at elBulli derived from the fact that the restaurant was open only six months a year, in order to dedicate the other six months to experimentation and creativity. Allegedly, this closing period enabled the restaurant to fully renovate its menu each year, presenting ever more exotic and ingenious creations to customers season after season. As a result, just as interested guests could not predict whether they would be chosen to dine at the elBulli restaurant, they were also not permitted to select what they wanted to eat once they had arrived there.

The mystical aura around elBulli was continuously reinforced by accounts of the restaurant’s leader, Ferran Adrià. For over a decade, the mass media has portrayed him as a genius, a visionary, and a sorcerer of cuisine. And, beyond cuisine, Adrià has been frequently compared to icons of creativity such as Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. With no English skills, Adrià has traveled all over the world giving talks about innovation and creativity; and without holding a college degree, he had stepped into the academic world as the keynote speaker of a course being taught at Harvard University called Science and Cooking. After the first iteration of the course in 2010, the number of students who wanted to enroll in the class was so great that a lottery had to be designed to determine who would get to participate. Thus, just as at the elBulli restaurant, students were not able to predict whether they would be chosen to be part of the class or whether they would have to try their luck during a subsequent year.

Months prior to my visit to elBulli in 2011, Adrià had announced the transformation of his mysterious restaurant into a think tank of creativity, which would reopen in 2015.4 Yet, when reading about elBulli’s reinvention from my office at Columbia University, I had realized that there was something puzzling about this new organization too. Despite my efforts, I hadn’t been able to understand what the elBulli Foundation was going to be about—an interesting fact in itself. And when searching the Internet, I had come across the vast amount of historical records and detailed accounts of elBulli’s creations, which, for the most part, were made

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available by the organization itself. In fact, I would later recognize these records when observing Adrià’s preparation of one of his restaurant’s final meals.

Curious about all this and with the intuition that there was much to be learned from the workings of elBulli from a sociological and organizational perspective, I prepared a two-page document describing my interest in conducting research at elBulli. I sent it that same week to the elBulli team. To my surprise, I seemed to be among the lucky ones, because a few days later I received a reply that said something like this: “Thanks so much for your e-mail on Ferran [Adrià’s] behalf. We find your project interesting and we would like to know what we can do to help.”

In my first encounters with Adrià and his team, I tried to explain to them my interest in studying elBulli as an organization whose experience could inform practices undertaken by other organizations concerned with the production of innovation. I would soon find out that the moment I had chosen to conduct my research was particularly fortuitous, given that my fieldwork was going to take place precisely when the organization was undergoing its most radical transformation and elBulli’s members, especially Adrià, were themselves questioning and evaluating the structures that sustained the organization’s operation.

Later, when I started collecting narratives from professionals in the gastronomic field both connected and unconnected to elBulli, I noticed that, like the mass media, many of them used expressions such as “genius,” “visionary,” or “God-like” to describe Adrià’s qualities. Many of my interviewees, for instance, intimated that they believed Adrià “was able to see more than others can see” and attested to this by pointing out his “magical” or “extraordinary” capacities to create. As a sociologist, however, I was not interested in examining the psychological features of Adrià’s personality, or in writing a biography that detailed his personal life (which is in fact already available for interested readers). Instead, my goal was to consider elBulli as a case that can expand our knowledge of how innovation can be enacted by an organization and, in so doing, provoke changes in the larger system of which it is part. Accordingly, Adrià’s personal beliefs or motivations were interesting to me only as long as they unveiled aspects of the role played by a charismatic leader in sustaining innovation over time.

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ElBulli was able to mobilize changes in the culinary field for over two decades, as we will see—changes that gradually percolated into other fields such as design, science, and technology. New culinary techniques and concepts developed by elBulli such as foams, frozen airs, spherifications, and deconstruction increasingly made their way into haute cuisine kitchens around the world. And, by the time the restaurant closed, elBulli had already entered people’s homes by marketing “molecular gastronomy kits” that offered the opportunity to introduce elements of elBulli’s cuisine into everyday meals. In addition to cooking techniques, organizational practices pioneered by elBulli had also spread into the high-end restaurant sector. Several recognized avant garde restaurants around the globe, for example, now have test kitchens or cuisine laboratories of their own, and also close for a definite period of time so as to fully dedicate their staff’s energy to creativity.

How was it possible for a restaurant in the middle of nowhere to reach and have an impact upon the world that resided outside it? How did a self-taught cook with no English skills come to be recognized as an international icon of creativity and innovation? In some way, elBulli has managed to stay creative for several years and continued to captivate the public’s attention during its periods of intermission. This book analyzes the process through which this occurred, not only by illuminating the underlying factors that explain Adrià’s “visionary” capacities but also, and most importantly, by examining the processes and dynamics that enable an organization to produce systematic and radical innovation.

My investigation will make clear that while many good ideas may emerge from random creative sparks or from an individual’s talent, the relentless production of innovation cannot be explained only by this. The research will show that innovation that is able to enact changes in a field is rather the result of concrete and collective practices that make it possible for new knowledge to be understood, recognized, and legitimized by the public. The experience of elBulli will illustrate that institutionalizing innovation involves the construction of an organizing structure that is able to win the support of a coherent group of people that helps to disseminate and maintain a new cause.

To understand the processes behind elBulli’s production of innovation, I examined the organization’s history and the different

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factors, both internal and external to the organization, that enabled it to become an avant garde restaurant, and that allowed Adrià to be recognized as a worldwide icon of innovation. Tracing the organization’s past, as we shall see, was critical in understanding the organization’s present, as it offered possibilities to identify the patterns that explain elBulli’s growing trajectory. Moreover, instead of limiting my analysis to the internal workings of elBulli, I examined the organization’s interaction with the wider context of its operation, what organizational scholars refer to as the “institutional environment.” This involved including the views of people who had directly witnessed the inner workings of elBulli and, therefore, could provide me with insights regarding what was distinctive about the organization. It also required the inclusion of the perceptions of people who were not connected to elBulli and, hence, who could tell me about how the organization was able to reach and influence outsiders.

Given that the culinary field is multidisciplinary, I gathered narratives from a wide variety of participants in the contemporary gastronomic industry in two different yet interconnected sites: Spain and the United States, mainly Barcelona and New York, cities considered culinary hubs. My interviewees included current and former members of elBulli, elBulli purveyors and collaborators, and former elBulli apprentices, most of whom were chefs at renowned restaurants at the time of my interviews. I also collected narratives of elBulli’s outsiders including gastronomic critics, chefs, faculty members of culinary institutes, and food scholars. During my fieldwork, furthermore, I attended gastronomic conferences and events advertised as platforms organized for chefs and by chefs, and had exclusive access to the elBulli workshop and to original documentation while the new foundation was being constructed. For a detailed account of the data collected and the subjects who participated in the study, please refer to the Appendix.

In this book, readers will find that while words like “visionary” or “sorcerer” have been repeatedly used to describe the personality of elBulli’s leader, the organization’s methods for developing innovation are far from incidental. Rather, plenty of purposeful action is involved in making innovations effective within the organization and recognized by those outside it. As is the case with every organization, at elBulli, specific practices were mobilized

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on the ground in order to reach the world outside its boundaries and, thereby, to consolidate its reputation within its field.

Ultimately, this book represents a journey into a puzzling organizational model that pushes itself to its limits. Readers will notice that, unlike other organizations engaged in the development of innovation, elBulli is not concerned with the production of final products or services, but with encouraging permanent processes of discovery. For this reason, rather than reproducing successes, elBulli chooses to continue to innovate. To do this, the organization built a dynamic structure to sustain innovation over time. This study offers a close look into the vision of this innovative organization, and the social arrangements that were generated to make this vision effective in reality. It explains the internal and external practices that were at play in the workings of elBulli, and that eventually mobilized the entire reinvention of the organization itself.

My work expands on existing accounts written about elBulli and Adrià in a number of ways. First, it constitutes an extensive analysis that goes beyond the organization’s limits (and of its leader’s individual capacities) to understand its functioning. It also expands sociological studies of haute cuisine by providing a new window of observation into the development of innovation in the gastronomic field, from the late twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is important, given that the culinary landscape has undergone significant changes in the last few decades. Among these is a new role for chefs in society, a phenomenon usually called celebrity chefs—a category in which Adrià is considered an iconic figure. Moreover, nowadays recipes and culinary experiences at restaurants are widely circulated throughout the Web by food professionals, food bloggers, and food aficionados alike. Cuisine, thus, has become a topic prevalent in society, manifested in the growing number of TV shows related to food and the increasing number of books and magazines that focus on cooking from different perspectives. By providing an in- depth analysis of one iconic organization in the contemporary culinary landscape, this book offers a peek into the inner world of chefs, and thereby into some of the dynamics that encouraged the gastronomic revolution that has taken place over the last two decades.

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Finally, this investigation proposes a new way to think about innovation that extends beyond the production of new ultimate products. Too often, innovation is examined by looking at an organization’s final outcomes (such as patents) and by analyzing the conditions that lead to those outcomes. The major concern of this book, instead, is to show how innovation can be systematically mobilized in and by organizing systems. In doing so, it attempts to unveil the concrete practices that enable new ideas to have a sustained impact upon a wider population.

The structure that I chose to organize the book reflects the different processes involved in the enactment of radical innovation, from envisioning and implementing, to socializing and legitimating. Chapter 1 sets the groundwork for understanding the origins of elBulli’s new ideas, and retraces the historical development of the organization prior to starting to propose new ways of doing things in cuisine. Chapter 2 examines the inner functioning of the organization by looking at how the vision of one individual was adopted by a group of creators who were all working toward a common goal. It also examines how teams, time, and space were managed at elBulli, and how the crafting of a “language,” accompanied by systematic documentation, became a central mechanism for sustaining innovation within the organization.

Chapter 3 deals with the social dynamics that made it possible for elBulli’s “new cuisine” to be understood and recognized by the gastronomic community. It describes the vehicles that were generated by the organization to stabilize a new basis of knowledge within its field. Chapter 4 examines the unintended consequences of the relentless production of innovation, its connection to the closure of the elBulli restaurant, and the need for the organization’s reinvention.

Finally, Chapter 5 engages with the ongoing construction of elBulli’s new organization, the elBulli Foundation. The transformation of the restaurant is used here as an opportunity to test and refine the practices found to explain the organization’s innovative capacity—from making new recipes, to making new organizational structures to innovate, to making an entirely new organization. The chapter also offers readers the opportunity to explore the uncertainty surrounding elBulli’s new project, and the limits of an organization’s search for radical innovation and endless reinvention.

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In analyzing the case of elBulli as one that can expand our understanding of how innovation works, this book addresses a number of themes that are central to sociology and to the study of organizations in general. On the one hand, it offers a close look into the phenomenon of charisma by examining the organized efforts made to sustain an organization and its leader’s charismatic authority. On the other hand, from a methodological standpoint, my investigation can be used as a resource for the study of other extraordinary populations. Sociologists tend to be experts in studying the outcasts or the socially marginalized, but not to interview and study those who are recognized as extraordinary creative minds. Readers who have conducted fieldwork might anticipate that this is not at all an easy task. In my case, my bilingualism was an essential resource that helped me deal with this type of personality, which is often complex and unpredictable, and also to eliminate the mystery around Adrià and his team. On repeated occasions, I found myself speaking quickly and assertively, as I saw them do in their interactions, so as to get my ideas and questions across. Yet it was only when I started to act as a mirror for them (that is, to develop diagrams and maps similar to the ones they did to show how I saw their work) that they started to see me as a different kind of expert and, accordingly, to treat me as an equal and sometimes even as a confidant.

While my research is valuable in the ways indicated above, it also has a number of limitations that are important to outline. First, as a case study, it does not include any exhaustive cross-case comparisons, but only considers the experience of other organizations (such as restaurants) to unveil the specificity of the case under study. Nevertheless, there are numerous universes that, like elBulli, have been a central force in driving innovation within the gastronomic field and in other fields, examination of which would shed light on the findings obtained from this study. Second, given that my goal was to understand how elBulli’s creations came to be recognized as innovations, the focus of my research is on success. I do hope, however, that my examination of the organization’s growth shows that favorable outcomes are neither necessary nor impossible for an organization’s development. Third, consistent with the ethnographic nature of my research, the analysis is restricted to the sites selected for the study and does not attempt to be representative of a general

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population. Thus, this book’s objective is not to provide definite answers that can be invariably applied to diverse contexts, but simply to offer insights for future studies and applications of innovation.

One final aspect that shaped this book and that I find important to share is that, during the course of my research, I was in constant interaction with different types of audiences: from academics to business professionals to chefs. While having these different audiences introduced additional complexity to the project, it also provided diverse and insightful feedback that greatly influenced this work. The writing style that I use is a reflection of this process. In my work, I try to avoid jargon as much as possible so as to make my analysis accessible to a wider readership, including people who are familiar with elBulli’s story and the maneuverings of the gastronomic field and those who are not, as well as people who are acquainted with sociological theories and empirical approximations and those who aren’t. In keeping with this goal, I use copious quotations, pictures, and diagrams in the hope that they will better convey the richness of the world that I encountered while doing fieldwork. I also present a recipe of elBulli at the opening of each chapter. These recipes retrace the historical development of the organization, and illustrate central arguments made throughout the book. In the end, I hope my study will provide readers with an opportunity to enter the workings of a mysterious organization, and to realize that if one looks closely enough, things might not seem that mysterious after all.

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0.1 and 0.2 (top) Ferran Adrià at his restaurant, and (bottom) elBulli’s terrace during the restaurant’s last week of operation; Cala Montjoi, Roses, Catalonia, Spain.

A Brief Note on the Meaning of Innovation Innovation has become a fashionable term, widely used across disciplines and industries. Yet the widespread use of the term has

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rendered its meaning largely ambiguous. As a result, the term innovation is often used interchangeably with similar-sounding concepts such as change, entrepreneurship, or creativity. While there is a thin line that distinguishes all these terms, it is important to clarify it for the purposes of this investigation.5

Innovation is not equivalent to change; innovation corresponds to the capacity to drive change. Any living system, an individual or an organization, is in constant transformation and evolution. Living systems cannot avoid change. Innovation, however, does not refer to inevitable, innate change. It involves the purposeful action of mobilizing change. As such, it implies a decision-making process through which uncertainty is turned into risk, risk that comes with the responsibility of having decided.6

Like innovation, entrepreneurship is the capacity to drive the development of a given enterprise. Yet, while entrepreneurship is typically associated with business activities, the management of risk that characterizes innovation may or may not be oriented toward making a profit. In this sense, innovation represents a broader term that incorporates, but is not restricted to, entrepreneurship.

Finally, innovation is not equivalent to creativity. Creativity refers to the envisioning of original ideas, whereas innovation corresponds to the process through which new ideas are developed and implemented in practice.7 This distinction is important as it implies that not every creative process will necessarily lead to an innovation. Innovations must have a social impact and be recognized by a community. Therefore, even if there might be plenty of creativity involved in the creation of, say, a new mobile device, a new delivery system, or a piece of art, these products and services are not innovations unless they have an effect upon a given audience.

The distinctions among these three terms are important for recognizing the case of elBulli as one that can expand our knowledge of how innovation works. The evolution of elBulli was marked by a series of turning points that led it to become a famous, avant garde restaurant. While some of the decisive moments in this organization’s development were intentionally conceived of or enacted by the organization, others were mainly the result of external circumstances. However—and here comes the organization’s agency in enacting change—these defining

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moments were actively mobilized or reinterpreted decisions that were made by elBulli, mainly by Adrià. Further, they were defined as decisions that coincided with or strengthened the organization’s ultimate goals.

In relation to the notion of entrepreneurship, in which every restaurant is in essence a for-profit venture, activities associated with creativity at the elBulli restaurant, which Adrià and his team conceived of as the core activity of the organization, were gradually decoupled from business activities. Consequently, the functioning of the elBulli restaurant per se was not directly associated with turning a profit. In fact, in its initial stages, the restaurant was not making enough money to pay its staff and, after gaining external recognition, the restaurant by itself was losing half a million euros per year. Adrià considered profitability and creativity to be two distinct sides of the same body and used the metaphor of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to explain the relationship between the two. Accordingly, during elBulli’s evolution, mechanisms were actively developed to keep profitability and creativity separated while, at the same time, nurturing each other.8

Ultimately, Adrià and his team were not solely idea men, but innovators. As we shall see, the knowledge and practices that elBulli developed somehow managed to trickle down from the isolated mountains of Cala Montjoi to be used and expanded by professionals around the world.

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Lobster Gazpacho, #45 1989

© Franscesc Guillamet Ferran

Serves 4 people

To prepare the boiled lobster: 2 750-g (1.5-lb) lobsters Salt

To prepare the base of the gazpacho: 500 g (2 cups) of boiled lobster water (above elaboration) 1 young 65-g (2.5-oz) spring onion 4 cloves of garlic 1 70-g (2.5-oz) red pepper 1 small cucumber 25 g (5 tsp) of Jerez vinegar 26 g (1 oz) of toasted pine nuts

To prepare the lobster gazpacho: Main gazpacho (above elaboration) Basil oil (prior elaboration)

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60 g (1 cup) of not-entirely-whipped cream

Final touches and presentation: 1. Put all the brunoised vegetables in a bowl with a pinch of salt and olive oil, enough to

make the vegetables stick together.

2. Make a vegetable quenelle with two spoons, and place it in the center of a plate.

3. Around it put 5 slices of lobster and 1 pincer.

4. Then add 2 stuffed cherry tomatoes and 2 stuffed spring onions.

5. On top of the vegetable quenelle, put a pinch of chervil and 2 stems of chives.

6. Add 2 pieces of toast with basil oil and 8 cucumber sticks distributed in pairs.

7. Finish the dish with 5 slices of padron pepper.

8. Finally, put the gazpacho, very cold, in a jar or in a tureen to be served by the waiter.

(Abbreviated for purposes of illustration.)1

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1 Context and Vision

One Day at the elBulli Restaurant

The first commandment in a kitchen is not disturbing the work…so if you want to see how we function, you need to become invisible.

—Ferran Adrià at elBulli restaurant, Spain The trip to Cala Montjoi, the natural reserve where the elBulli restaurant is located, involves a seven-kilometer drive on a thin road up from a town called Roses in Girona, Costa Brava, Catalonia. The deep blue color of the sea can be seen at the end of every corner of the road, occasionally interrupted by Mediterranean-style houses. During the restaurant’s busy season, Adrià lives in one of those houses, just in front of the elBulli restaurant. Back in the 1980s, when Adrià first joined the restaurant, going to elBulli was literally an adventure. As one of my interviewees recalled, “The road had no pavement; you literally had to break your car to be able to have a meal there.” Once arrived at the bay of Cala Montjoi, it is possible to distinguish a sign with printed letters that say “elBulli.” It is common for tourists around the area to stop by and take a picture next to the sign. A stone stairway separates the restaurant from the beach. When I arrived there I could see three of elBulli’s apprentices, stagiaires, wearing their chefs’ coats, staring at the gentle movement of the sea. They were not talking or interacting with each other in any way. Rather, it looked as if they were mentally preparing themselves for what was about to come. It was the end of July 2011. On short notice, Adrià had allowed me to come to the restaurant to observe the work performed during the restaurant’s final season.

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At the entrance, there was a figure of a bulldog in gray and yellow, representative of the restaurant’s name, elBulli. David Lopez, a member of the staff in charge of IT tasks and who also performed front-of-the-house tasks, took me through the main corridor that leads to elBulli’s dining area. The restaurant’s innovative and cutting-edge image stood in stark contrast with its old-fashioned interior decorations: reddish cushions and curtains, chairs with floral tapestry, lights that simulated candles, and random pictures of different sizes in different frames. It seemed ironic that avant garde food was being served there. I caught a glimpse of Adrià walking from one side of the corridor to the other. He was wearing a white chef’s coat, black pants, and Nike shoes, and he was agitatedly talking on his mobile phone.

As was customary with elBulli’s guests, I was first taken to the kitchen. It was a large kitchen, 340 square meters in size, illuminated by natural light that filtered through a big glass wall. At the front, the kitchen had a big sculpture of a bull’s head. I could count around forty cooks, only three of them women, working on different tasks. I was not introduced in any formal way. In fact, nobody seemed to notice my presence, even though I was insistently taking notes and photos of what they did. I immediately recognized Oriol Castro, one of elBulli’s heads of cuisine and director of the creative department, an additional kitchen station that functioned all year in conjunction with the restaurant’s productive tasks. Next to Castro was Mateu Casañas, head of the “sweet world” or pastry station, and Eduard Xatruch, another head of cuisine, responsible for shopping tasks and relationships with purveyors. They were all very serious, working on some preparation with one of the apprentices. Adrià came into the kitchen explaining how especially hectic this week was; journalists from all around the world wanted to come to the restaurant, Adrià asserted, and he already had several interviews scheduled for that same day.

At exactly 2:00 P.M. Castro said, “Good morning, everyone, could you pay attention, please?” The brigade of cuisine rapidly lined up along the walls of elBulli’s kitchen, roughly resembling a military formation. In a matter of ten minutes, and at a very fast pace, Castro explained the main issues that needed to be addressed that day. He first pointed out what went wrong the day before: “It is important to be a ‘person.’ If someone asks you

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something, you need to respond. If you don’t want to, then you should leave. It is as simple as that. First and foremost, we need to be teammates and ‘persons’ with each other.” Then Castro proceeded to explain the menu that was going to be served that day, paying special attention to the incorporation of a new dish, which he described as the elBulli restaurant’s final creation: Peach Melba, the last dish of elBulli. Castro indicated that the new dish was inspired by a recipe created by Auguste Escoffier, the father of modern French cuisine, given that the number of this dish, 1846, coincided with Escoffier’s birth year. He also pointed out that the dish would incorporate an old culinary concept created by elBulli, deconstruction, and a new one that the team had been developing in the last years and which aimed to advance a new presentation of dishes in the form of “sequences.” Castro carefully detailed each of the ingredients, preparations, and plating involved in the new dish, using terms like “lyophilized peach seeds,” “frozen molds,” and “bitter almond oil”:

We’ll start to do the ‘Peach Melba.’ Begin by preparing the lyophilized peach seeds. There are two peach seeds: the mold of frozen cotton with toasted almond and amaretto and the one with peach liquor. You freeze it and remove it from its mold….Leave it in the small wooden box with a hint of bitter almond oil….

(Field notes, Oriol Castro, head chef of elBulli’s kitchen and creative director) Castro spoke so fast that I found it difficult to follow what he was saying. He then concluded the meeting by explaining how the Peach Melba was going to be incorporated into the menu:

Yesterday we served it to a few tables, today we’ll serve it to fifteen tables and on Tuesday to another fifteen. On Friday and Saturday [the last days of the elBulli restaurant’s life] it will be fully incorporated into the menu.

(Field notes, Oriol Castro, head chef of elBulli’s kitchen and creative director) In a matter of seconds, the line of cooks split apart and each one of them retreated to a specific position to start working. I stayed in the kitchen, observing how the mise en place for that night’s meal was being set up. Adrià walked the kitchen, interjecting clear-cut orders to elBulli’s heads of cuisine. Using a yellow pencil that he had tucked behind his right ear, Adrià quickly checked the different documents, including the menus that were going to be served that night, lists of ingredients and preparations, or the recipes of the

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staff’s “family meal,” usually served at 6:30 P.M., before the clients’ arrival.

At 4:00 P.M. I went to the dining room where the wait staff would gather. There were fourteen young men and women who were waiters and sommeliers’ assistants. Juli Soler, co-owner of elBulli, was there too, wearing sandals, shorts, and a black t-shirt. The head of the dining room, Luis Garcia, started the meeting by reminding his staff that the diners who were visiting that night had made reservations up to eight months in advance and, most likely, had planned their vacations around the opportunity to eat at elBulli. The staff needed to make their best effort to offer customers “the most memorable meals of their life,” Garcia said. “We need to make them feel comfortable and natural. Make people slowly fall in love with us. All our effort must go in between lines.” This remark, though it would go unnoticed by me at that point, would later emerge as the fundamental pattern that characterizes the elBulli organization’s efforts to mobilize a “new cuisine.” Garcia also reminded the staff that the director of the Royal Spanish Academy of Gastronomy was coming that day to give elBulli’s members a special recognition, so they needed to adjust their schedules “to make everything work to perfection.” During the meeting, members of the wait staff actively shared their opinions about the service provided the night before.

Castro, head of the kitchen staff, explained to the waiters (again in exactly ten minutes) the ingredients, preparations, and serving modality of the dishes that were being prepared and, specifically, of the new and last dish of the elBulli restaurant, the Peach Melba. “We served it to a few tables yesterday and the result was magic,” he told the wait staff. Castro provided great detail about each of the items that comprised that night’s menu, clearly distinguishing between creations that were extended versions of dishes served in prior years, transformations or combinations of previous dishes, or completely new dishes. Along with the description of each dish, Castro specified the year in which it had originally been created, the “flashbacks” that inspired them, the exact way in which each dish was meant to be eaten by the diner (e.g., in one or two bites), and how it should be served (e.g., in a spoon or some other kind of dinner service, finished at the table or in the kitchen).

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When the meeting was about to end, Juli Soler pointed out, laughing, “Look who is here, the kid, the kid!” It was Albert Adrià, Ferran Adrià’s brother, who had worked at elBulli since he was fifteen years old, after dropping out of high school, and had left in 2008. Now he was running restaurants in Barcelona, including Tickets and Bodega 1900, with his brother Ferran as his business partner. For many years, Albert had been a central driving force of elBulli’s creativity, and he continued to be associated with everything that elBulli did. “I wanted to show my friends elBulli,” Albert said in a very casual way. His brother came to greet him from the kitchen. He seemed very happy and surprised to see him.

In the kitchen everything was being set up for that night’s dinner. Noise came exclusively from the movement of cooks, who diligently formed small groups, worked on some preparation, and then split apart to continue working on something else. They did this for hours, mimicking a well-oiled machine. Oftentimes, cooks used the word quemo (the Spanish word for burning) to notify others when they were holding something that required caution. As Lisa Abend described in her detailed account of the inner workings of elBulli’s kitchen, this word was employed as an umbrella term to coordinate the highly international crowd that composed elBulli’s brigade de cuisine.2 During the rest of the afternoon I took notes and photographs of the work within the kitchen and talked informally with members of elBulli’s team, trying to remain invisible, as Adrià had indicated to me when I first came in. Before going to the elBulli restaurant, I had been told that I needed to leave after the mise en place had been set up, a rule that is maintained to ensure the privacy of the diners. Yet, when I was about to leave, Adrià reached out to me and said in an almost unintelligible way, “Hey, this is just a glimpse for you to get an idea of what we do!… Understanding elBulli is very complex…there are years of history… there is too much to explain.”

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1.1 and 1.2 (top) From left to right: three stagiaires outside elBulli restaurant before the start of a working day, and

(bottom) Ferran Adrià in the elBulli restaurant’s kitchen reviewing the orders to be prepared that night, July 2011.

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1.3 Meeting of the kitchen staff at elBulli restaurant, July 2011.

Pyramid of Creativity: Ferran Adrià’s Vision of Innovation

A restaurant is a chef’s skin.

—Personal interview, chef and owner of haute cuisine restaurant, United States In the organizations literature, restaurants have been described as “individual-business models” typically built around a chef or restaurateur’s goals and vision.3 In this sense, considering Adrià’s internal drive and beliefs is very important in understanding the workings of his organization. As elBulli’s leader, Adrià’s motivations are likely to reveal relevant aspects of how innovation was enacted by his organization over time and of the role that he played in shaping the organization’s development. One haute cuisine chef in New York City supported this interpretation, saying that restaurants are the medium through which a chef expresses his creativity. A restaurant is a reflection of a chef in the same way as your skin is a reflection of who you are, he remarked. Trying to separate the two is impossible, as they are two sides of the same unity:

ElBulli is who Adrià is. You wear your skin. Adrià wears his skin, which is elBulli, and I wear mine. This is something that is not selected. It is something that you grow into. It is something that you are, that lives with you, grows and evolves. As you get older, your skin changes, but it’s always a reflection of who you are [as a creator].

(Personal interview, chef and owner of haute cuisine restaurant, United States)

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The binding connection between the role of chefs and restaurants has also been pointed out in academic studies of haute cuisine that consider the chef–restaurant dyad (as opposed to only one or the other) as a main unit of analysis in examining institutional change.4 This chapter describes Adrià’s vision of innovation and explores how this vision illuminates the central beliefs and motivations that were decisive in shaping the organization’s development. As a sociologist, my intention is not to explore the psychological mechanisms that explain an individual’s beliefs, but to understand the relationship of these beliefs with the social system to which they are associated.5 In this case, it is the elBulli organization. A brief overview of the organization’s historical trajectory will lay the groundwork for the subsequent examination of the concrete practices that enable the mobilization of radical innovation. This preliminary analysis will suggest that vital aspects of the production of innovation are left unexplained if we look only at an organization’s new ultimate products or final invention stages. Instead, the development of radical innovation emerges as an unfolding process that is built through intertwined movements across different patterns of creation.

Over the years, Adrià’s beliefs of innovation acted as a powerful force that mobilized and shaped the entire elBulli organization. Informed by more than thirty years in gastronomy, Adrià developed a metaphor to explain his vision of innovation, which he calls “the pyramid of creativity.” This metaphor identifies four different modes of innovation—reproduction, evolution, combination, and conceptual creativity—each of which represents an increasing disposition to novelty.

(1) Reproduction. This is the least innovative mode of creativity, as it corresponds to the replication of an existing culinary creation. It is the culinary mode of novice cooks, who follow a recipe, deviating little. This method of creation is very similar to the act of copying, yet, given that circumstances change, the end result also tends to differ every time a recipe is executed. Adrià situates this mode of creation at the bottom of his creative pyramid due to the lower level of inventiveness and originality that it requires.

(2) Evolution defines minor changes introduced to existing products (e.g., recipes) that are conducive to a novel overall

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outcome. A good example of this in the culinary world is the incorporation of a new ingredient into a traditional elaboration. Adrià explains this by using the example of introducing tomato sauce into a traditional Italian dish of pasta, which gave rise to a completely new output, namely the recipe known as Spaghetti Pomodoro. In this case, the novelty of the outcome tends to be a by-product of the circumstances, such as creativity emerging from encounters between different culinary cultures.

(3) Higher on the scale of creativity, Adrià situates combination, which identifies the rearrangement of old and new elements (products, technologies, preparations, or styles) into new formats. Novel combinations in cuisine may emerge from the discovery of new cooking products (e.g., a new herb, seaweed, or powder), merged with the incorporation of new equipment into the kitchen (e.g., sous-vide water oven, a Pacojet machine to thicken liquids, or a food dehydrator), new sources of inspiration (e.g., nature, childhood memories, sense of humor) or even through exposure to entirely new genres of cooking (e.g., Asian cooking, Mediterranean cooking, or avant garde cooking). This notion coincides with traditional conceptualizations that define innovation as the combination of old and new ideas as well as the blending of knowledge across disparate domains, a conception originally derived from Schumpeter’s 1934 account of innovation as the “carrying out of new recombinations.” According to Schumpeter, recombinant innovations range from the creation of new goods to new methods of production, or even entirely new markets. Over the years, this recombinant conception of innovation has been expanded in multiple directions and used to explain creative dynamics in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the emergence of good ideas among business groups, to the invention of cellular phones, medical devices, and fashion jeans, to the production of Web designs by new media firms, to name just a few examples.6

(4) At the apex of his pyramid Adrià places conceptual creativity. He identifies this as the search for new words and sentences aimed at expanding the repertoire or language of a given community. For Adrià this mode of creativity in gastronomy primarily involves the active quest for new concepts and techniques with the capacity to expand and enrich a given culinary language. For instance, revolutionary cooking techniques

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incorporated in haute cuisine in recent years include rapid freezing through the use of liquid nitrogen and gelation via the use of alginates. Examples of cooking concepts are deconstruction (breaking apart traditional dishes), “vegetal cuisine” (situating vegetables as the main focus of a dish), and adaptation (positioning established culinary styles into new contexts).

The fact that Adrià places conceptual creativity at the apex of his pyramid says a lot about the actual development of his organization, elBulli. For Adrià, being innovative entails nothing less than producing the highest degree of novelty possible, and, in his view, this is achieved by the invention of new cooking concepts and techniques. Accordingly, elBulli’s ultimate goal in creating, unlike many other restaurants, is not simply to develop something that brings pleasure to clients or to generate new flavor combinations.7 For elBulli, providing a pleasurable experience (in the gustatory or aesthetic sense) is only one condition that the restaurant’s culinary creations seek to fulfill. Rather, elBulli’s ultimate goal in creating is to develop something that can produce breakthroughs of knowledge in the field—something that elBulli’s members and other culinary professionals have never seen before and which, therefore, needs to be invented.

ElBulli’s emphasis on the generation of new culinary concepts and techniques, as opposed to new dishes or recipes per se, responds precisely to the importance that Adrià assigns to mobilizing radical knowledge in his field. Culinary techniques and concepts have a higher potential for the production of novelty in gastronomy, both from a quantitative standpoint (by offering the possibility to develop infinite numbers of new dishes or culinary creations) and from a qualitative standpoint (by proposing new ways of doing things both within the organization and in the culinary field at large). Based on his experience and intuition, Adrià has developed an example to explain the significance of creating new techniques and concepts in gastronomy through the popular Spanish preparation of the potato omelette:

One day, someone had the idea of making an omelette [new technique]. It is likely that someone simply broke a couple of eggs in a frying pan and thought, ‘What is this!?’…but later on, someone else had the idea of making a round omelette…then, to add tomato, onions, parsley, or whatever else was at hand….The French omelette was invented!…

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With this [new technique] one can make thousands of different omelettes! But if it hadn’t been for the first one, all the rest would not have been possible!

(Public talk given by Ferran Adrià as part of the tour “Partners for Transformation” with Telefónica Company, November 2011, Argentina)

Another example commonly used by Adrià to explain the relevance of conceptual creativity is the creation of puff pastry, a relatively simple culinary technique that nonetheless makes it possible for the user to produce incredibly complex results. The technique of puff pastry creates a simultaneously soft and crispy texture that can be used in dishes both sweet and savory. It is possible that Adrià’s focus on conceptual creativity might have derived from modern French chefs who regarded cooking essentially as a repertoire of culinary techniques and not of products.

From an analytical standpoint, Adrià’s conceptualization unveils an important distinction in examining innovation. Unlike final products, the significance of culinary concepts and techniques relies on the fact that they are portable in essence, whereas dishes or recipes—especially highly idiosyncratic ones—might not be. Recipes are tied to the materiality of food and typically to the context of restaurants, whereas culinary concepts and techniques can be removed from their context of creation and applied to a wide variety of situations. As a result, the potential of concepts to trigger changes is greater because they can lead to developments that can be undertaken and reproduced by other actors in the system.

Let me explain this further by proposing an analogy within the music industry. Culinary techniques are to chefs what rules of harmony are to musicians.8 Just as mastering the underlying harmonies of music enables musicians to create and reproduce songs, knowing a repertoire of culinary techniques makes it possible for chefs to generate endless numbers of food compositions. Note here the difference between the rules of harmony and the final tunes that may result from them. Sociological studies of jazz performance, for instance, have highlighted that it is this formulaic character of music that ultimately explains the ability of musicians to perform together proficiently, even if they have never played together in the past.9 Knowing the rules that support the development of final compositions enables practitioners to effectively navigate their way through songs they might have not heard before and also to extend known songs in

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new directions. Something similar happens in dance. As expressed by the famous New York choreographer Twyla Thwarp, “the more technique you have, the more freedom you can have as a dancer and the better performer you can be.”10

This distinction between final products and new concepts and techniques—what I call conceptual innovations—also applies to the development of innovation in fields like art or technology. Creating a new painting or sculpture is different from generating new conceptual developments that, in some cases, may give rise to entirely new artistic movements. Impressionists, for example, developed a number of new artistic concepts and techniques (such as the use of thick brushstrokes, tubes of paint, pre-prepared canvases, and observations made outdoors) that aim to depict modern life in more direct and powerful ways. This set of conceptual innovations, in turn, promoted a revision of old paradigms and a shift in artistic taste. Prior to the Impressionist movement, only mirror-like images of reality were counted as art, and any deviation from this was considered erratic or unskilled.11 Similarly, the new rules behind Cubism enabled its creators, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, to develop multiple pieces of artwork of different kinds, and later evolved into an avant garde movement that was joined by other artists in the early twentieth century, and even extended to other fields such as literature, architecture, and music.

Another example can be found in the technology industry, specifically, in Apple Inc. and its charismatic cofounder, Steve Jobs. There is a difference between this company’s production of new final products (or improved versions of those products), say Mac computers, iPhones, or iPads, and the generation of new technological concepts with the capacity to offer endless possibilities of creation within the company and for other companies in the technology industry. Examples of these new concepts might be the notion of a personalized computer or a smartphone that functions based on software applications and the use of a touch screen. The underlying conceptual and technological developments behind these inventions are what I call conceptual innovations. At Apple, the development of innovation is aimed at offering users a “new technological experience,” not new technological devices per se—much in the same way the elBulli restaurant’s goal was to offer customers a new culinary experience

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and not merely the opportunity to taste new dishes or representations of food.

Finally, within academia, scholars seeking to advance a line of knowledge in any given discipline might generate several or even hundreds of final products during their careers (e.g., academic papers or books as analogous to a restaurant’s dishes or recipes). These ultimate products, in turn, may play an important role in building the academics’ status and reputation within their fields. Yet it is possible that only a few of those final products (or perhaps none of them) advance a concept or method that the academic considers truly groundbreaking and, as such, able to serve as a platform for the generation of numerous final products (again, academic papers or books) developed either by him or by other members in his scholarly community. Conceptual innovations, therefore, are different from the outcomes that might result from them.

As in the fields of music, dance, art, technology, or academia, in cuisine, concepts and techniques can be easily detached from final food compositions and applied to a wide variety of contexts, irrespective of the chef’s particular background and culinary preferences or the diners’ local tastes. In this sense, techniques and concepts represent stronger cultural markers that can be borrowed from one culinary paradigm for another while still sustaining their independence from each other. This is what happened, for example, between the classical and nouvelle cuisine movement in the 1970s. While exploiting their foundation in classical techniques, nouvelle cuisine chefs like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé, Alain Chapel, and Pierre and Jean Troisgros advanced a new set of conceptual developments (such as greater simplicity in recipes, the use of fresh ingredients, and imagination) that distinguished their work from existing conventions. What is most interesting about elBulli in this respect is that, following Adrià’s vision, the organization’s main goal is to constantly rebuild and expand the existing repertoire of concepts and techniques that supports the craft of cooking.

To better understand elBulli’s vision of innovation, however, it is important to understand the dynamics of the culinary field. Especially since the 1980s, haute cuisine’s French identity has been challenged by its increasingly global scale. A number of culinary approaches have started to gain prominence in the

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culinary field, such as the slow food movement, the farm-to-table movement, and more recently, the Nordic cuisine movement, just to mention a few examples. The experimental or “molecular cuisine”12 movement in which elBulli and Adrià are recognized as a key driving force is another culinary approach that achieved recognition at the turn of the twenty-first century. Like other movements in haute cuisine, however, the experimental approach encouraged by elBulli did not involve the total replacement of old paradigms. That is to say, the gastronomic field did not experience a totalistic shift toward elBulli’s new culinary vision; nor did Adrià and his team detach themselves from classical or modern styles of French cookery such as those developed by Chef Antonin Carême and later by George Auguste Escoffier. Yet this does not mean that we should underestimate its importance. In the course of mobilizing a new cuisine, elBulli was able to establish a new basis of knowledge, mobilize supporters, and get that knowledge recognized within and beyond its field, all while being declared “the most influential restaurant in the world” by the time it closed in 2011.13 It did so, I will argue, not only by recombining existing creations, but also, and most importantly, by mobilizing a new set of knowledge and epistemic practices that enacted changes in the paradigmatic ways of doing things in haute cuisine.

Conceptually, the approach proposed by elBulli differed from nouvelle cuisine chefs in its approximation of innovation. While nouvelle cuisine chefs used new technologies to do things better or faster, their approach to cooking remained bound to new representations of food. Following the principles that had guided the invention of Modern French cuisine since the nineteenth century, especially post-Carême, the work of nouvelle cuisine chefs continued to focus on pleasing customers through the presentation of enjoyable food. The work of elBulli and Adrià represented a paradigm shift in this respect insofar as it proposed a change in focus from new representations of food to the development of conceptual innovations. To put it simply, elBulli aimed to take creativity to an extreme by offering the interested public not merely new dishes, but new concepts with the potential to present opportunities to think differently about food, sometimes even at the expense of pleasure.

Moreover, unlike classical French conceptions in which discoveries are generated while creating a meal, at elBulli the act

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of discovery is a goal in itself. The meal is essentially defined by the creator and is ultimately aimed at opening the guests’ palates and minds to novel possibilities. While the importance that elBulli assigns to process is also a feature of other culinary approaches, such as those that emphasize the authenticity of food, what is distinctive about elBulli is that its efforts deviate more and more from food to instead enter a conceptual realm. ElBulli’s understanding of innovation, then, is not associated with extension or improvement, but with the notion of invention.14 Accordingly, the organization’s objective is not to relentlessly produce innovative products, nor to indefinitely rearrange combinations that have proven successful. Instead, elBulli’s ultimate goal is to encourage permanent processes of discovery with the capacity to shift the rules that shape a field.

One could say, therefore, that a voracious appetite for radical innovation is the kernel of Adrià’s vision, and, as we shall see, it is also the key characteristic that permeates every aspect of the elBulli organization. Whereas typically an entrepreneur would advance the development of a new enterprise by carefully examining potential competitors and associated risks and by gathering information on the existing expectations that the new product could fulfill, in directing elBulli, Adrià takes a quite different approach. ElBulli is managed by devoting the largest amount of energy and time to the advancement of conceptual developments that can introduce changes in the typical ways of doing things. Once having achieved this, elBulli’s members then think about the ways in which the invention—a new concept or technique—can become accessible to and accepted by a relevant audience in the form of final outcomes, such as dishes or recipes. From elBulli’s approach, then, the management of expectations operates in the reverse way: They come from the mind of the creator or group of creators and are subsequently transmitted to the public. Stemming from this way of reasoning, Adrià and his team strive to get to that instant in which they know that they have found something truly new. In this process, uncertainty is not a problem for the organization. On the contrary, members of elBulli are constantly looking for ways to encounter uncertainty, because their experience has shown them that this is where radical novelty comes from. Rather than being afraid of uncertainty, the elBulli team, and especially Adrià, are afraid of getting locked into

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reproducing modes of creativity—copying their own creations or others’, or continuing to recombine existent creations—as this would mean that they have fallen into what Adrià considers inferior modes of creativity, such as that of novice cooks or recombinant cooks, a category with which elBulli does not want to identify.