If the Adria family are culinary royalty then we are currently living in the Albertian era under the reign of Albert Adrià .
Under the elBarri concept, the former elBulli chef and Chef’s Table star has multiple projects on the go, Enigma, Tickets, Hoja Santa, Bodega 1900 and Pakta, not to mention Adrià’s collaboration with brother Ferran and José Andrés the Mercado Little Spain that opened in Hudson Yards, New York, in March of this year, as well as Cakes and Bubbles at the Hotel Café Royal in the city’s West End.
You would wonder where the great chef finds the time to do any actual cooking. Adrià, however, is at heart, more than a mere entrepreneur, part scientist, part artist, alchemist part entertainer, of course, his natural environment is in the test kitchen, experimenting, innovating, hunting the new and meaningful in his world of avant-garde gastronomy.
We so much going on in Adrià’s world, with everything in flux, constantly changing and evolving it is nigh on impossible for him to choose dishes that represent the essence of Albert Adria’s cooking. We asked him anyway.
Which dishes do you consider most representative of your cuisine and why?
After 30 years it is hard to choose any dish, even more when we never keep the same dish on the menu for very long...
One of them would be the Coulommiers cheesecake, I choose this dish since we just recently opened Cakes & bubbles in London where we serve this dish and other sweet dishes created at elBarri, and since we started serving it at Tickets a few years back it became an instant house emblem.
Another of my favourites would be the Green "peasion" fruit, that is a passion fruit that is emptied and filled with char grilled peas, mint, chicken stock and passion fruit juice. It is playful, fun and delicious.
And of course our world-famous spherical olives that we just can't remove from our menu...people won't let us.
