The Sorcerer's Apprentices
A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli
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3.9 • 23 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Kitchen Confidential meets Heat in the first behind-the-scenes portrait of the world’s most influential restaurant and the aspiring culinary geniuses who toiled to make it so exceptional.
WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THE SCENES AT ELBULLI?
Elected best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine an unprecedented five times, elBulli is where chef Ferran Adrià’s remarkable cuisine comes to life—with dragon cocktails that make the drinker breathe smoke and caviar made from tiny spheres of olive oil. elBulli is also the object of culinary pilgrimage—millions clamor every year for a reservation at one of its tables.
Yet few people know that, behind each of the thirty or more courses that make up a meal at elBulli, a small army of stagiaires—apprentice chefs—labor at the precise, exhausting work of executing Adrià’s astonishing vision.
In The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli, Lisa Abend explores the remarkable system that Adrià uses to run his restaurant and, in the process, train the next generation of culinary stars.
Today, food has become the focus of unprecedented attention, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentices explores the strange evolution—in less than two decades—of a once-maligned profession into a source of celebrity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For years, chef Adri 's creative and enigmatic culinary genius at his restaurant el Bulli drew not only the attention of the world's top chefs and food critics but also of aspiring culinary artists looking to apprentice there. Food writer Colman Andrews has recently written a biography of Adri (Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food), and now New York Time's Spain correspondent Abend offers an intimate glimpse of life as a stagiaire a cook who agrees to work for almost nothing for a season as one of Adri 's apprentices. Weaving the history of the restaurant and Adri 's own story with the threads of the 35 stagiaires who apprenticed at el Bulli from June to December 2009, she captures the intense desire to learn and to please, the demanding pace of the work, and the anxiety over success and failure that drives these young chefs. Some of the stagiaires, unwilling to submit to the ego-crunching drudgery of the work, leave early in the season; others, worried constantly about living up to the demands of the position, settle into a rhythm that carries them through the mundane details of preparing meals and propels them to a new level of culinary skill and inventiveness. Abend's sometimes lively, often plodding narrative provides another dimension to the culinary legend that is el Bulli.
Customer Reviews
Where's the Magic?
How could a book about the supposed most innovative, modern and influential restaurant in the world be so absolutely and unequivocally BORING?!?!?!?!!!!!!! Read this book and quickly find out. Can I get a refund on this purchase?