EL BULLI

El Bulli (pronounced “L Boo-Yee”) dominates the top position in most listsof the world's best restaurants, and has held top spot in the“Restaurant” list for the last four years (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006).

Even in the strangely self-obsessed world of top chefs, this ranking is seldom railed against by Ferran Adria's peers; a tacit agreement perhaps that he is that rare thing someone who has inspired a paradigm shift in fine dining, a sort of Mozart of the kitchen. For, of the other restaurants in the top five, two are run by disciples who cite time cooking at El Bulli as the ignition for their careers and ideas, and the other two share Adria's principles of innovation; that using food as more than just nourishment but as an invocation of memory to create a connection between chef and diner at a far deeper and more fundamental level. The woman I love snorts at this as pretension and good marketing but I liken it to how when we eat our grandmother's food we are tasting not just the ingredients but our history, our heritage,our relationship with her, and everything that happened every other time we ate it. This only lessened the eye-rolling a little.

Ferran Adria's cooking is built around the chef's desire to present familiar flavours in new and unfamiliar ways. To achieve this, the restaurant is shut for the months of the European winter while Adria retires to his workshop cum laboratory to imagine up new ideas and techniques to achieve a menu that alters radically each season. The question is whether the result is actually dinner, or just culinary high wire antics aimed at impressing through their very newness and innovation.The question is, “Is El Bulli yummy?”

Adria's restaurant is a nondescript three hour drive east along the coast from Barcelona. There is a strange “butterflies in hobnail boots” sense of anticipation clattering round my gut as we drive in to Roses, the seaside town closest to El Bulli. Roses is the most unlikely neighbour for the world's most out-there restaurant. The crescent of coarse yellow sand is crusted with layer upon layer of fading five story family hotels and the beach is packed with kiddies, solid-calved old ladies paddling in black and elderly blokes in budgie smugglers preening. It all looks like a scene from one of those lurid Technicolor travelogues of the some long lost era. The esplanade is lined with cheap cafés that smell of frying and stale beer.

Our hotel is pure Roses too - a one star at the wrong end of the beach with matchstick furniture and cheap framed prints of fading fishing boats. It is the only place in town with rooms left though. Note to self: next time you get a booking at El Bulli in December book the hotel room then rather than waiting until Spain's peak season of August!

I have wanted to eat at El Bulli ever since I started writing about food and restaurants ten year's back. So much so that when my booking and my role on MasterChef were confirmed on the same day, it was the table for four that I rang friends and colleagues to boast about. It is one of the great contemporary culinary myths that in the three days in October that El Bulli accepts bookings, they receive two million emails chasing just 8000 seats for dinner. Ignoring the rather geek-boy concerns about how big their server must be to handle that much traffic, getting a table here is harder than any other restaurant in the world and prized accordingly. The woman I love is just concerned that the food is going to be just plain weird.

I suppose this is how players must feel before a Grand Final. It is seven hours before dinner so we potter on the beach, try to siesta, and generally mope around until its time to get ready. My wife and I sit around in the rickety hotel bar waiting for my friend and Sydney Good Food Guide editor Joanna Saville and her sister to arrive. Then we can leave. I'm nervous like before a first date - appropriately a pimple pops up on my forehead that afternoon.

After a search for spot cream - how do you say “Clearasil” in Catalan? - and a check for aftershave levels, four of us cram into a little local taxi to wend 20 minutes up and away over the headlands towards a far sleepier tourist cove that was once best known a scuba diving location.There, clinging to one side is the low-rise adobe home that houses El Bulli. That busy but goat-track-narrow road of precipitous drops and views over a shimmering crystalline Med helps distance the tat of Roses, building the anticipation with every hairpin turn. It was to this coast that Dali fled the world and it's fitting that it now provides a home to the chef with a similar twisted modern bent to his mien.

There's a strange trill that shimmers across all of us aswe turn into the drive past a long scree of artfully piled stones but the welcome overwhelms any initial trepidation. When in Australia a the culmination of his world book tour Ferran Adria was tired and quite distracted. Here he is animated, relaxed and his tan face wrinkles in a smile as we walk into his kitchen. In his chef's jacket and apron, Adria is nuggety. He's wearing jeans and a white chef's jacket. This kitchen tour seems to be part of most people's experience of eating at a top modern Spanish place but he has a smart celebrity's knack of making everyone feel special.

It's strange, finally, to be somewhere with someone that is so much in their place. We stand in front of the giant bronze bull's head that has fooled some - yup that's my hand sneaking up embarrassedly - into thinking that the restaurant is named after it rather than the previous owner's obsession with bulldogs. Adria demands pictures. He crosses his arms over his belly and laughs as I do the same “It's a good way to hide the stomach,” he observes in a mix of Catalan and pigeon English.

His modern kitchen, that has the sleek lines of an art gallery, is full of an army of 45 young chefs. Adria's fame and Spain's culinary training regime,which includes mandatory work experience, means the place is full o fchefs earning little more than knowledge and the honour of working in the best restaurant in the world. This system of apprenticeship allows some top Spanish restaurants like El Bulli to run ratios of chefs to customers that bubble around one to one!

A meal at El Bulli starts with snacks on the small terrace that overlooks the rough bay of Caja Monjoi and the path that leads around it. Every so often families in bikinis, boardies and sarongs traipse past on their way back from the beach and look in. This, and the sort of country pub, wood-beamed dining rooms full of bulldog figurines and what could pass as the dodgiest paintings from a Rotary Art Show, makes El Bulli seem like a surprisingly un-elitist spot. It is a world away from the gilt,snootiness, and champagne-chariots of many French three Michelin star places.

“Snacks” - it is such prosaic term for the creations that arrive first; glassy wafers flavoured with vanilla or with sweet tart pineapple studded with unlikely success by the salt-bitter contrast of black olive pieces. Then there are crazy salty candy shells that crack sweetly and send shivers down the spine as a filling of intense buttery liquid peanut splashes across your palate. After these faux peanuts more oral fireworks come with his famous olives. These virtual olives are prima facie evidence of Adria's love of deconstructing food to re engineer the flavour in different ways. Here a smooth pliable dusky-green jelly-skin holds the olive-flavoured juice. Bite and it explodes splattering intense olive liquor across your mouth.

We drink a bottle of elite Kripta cava (Spanish wine made in the champagne manner). It is so fine - elusive and bright at first, more mellow and toasty as it sits in the glass - that it could make a Reims widow nervous, and we “snack-on”. Odd delicate crackers of Japanese intent; sticks of sugar cane soaked with the flavours of mojito and caipirinha cocktails that you suck; fat half cherries coated in the flavour of salty sour Japanese plum. These ooze a combination of cherry juice and plum wine so much so that after my second one it looks like I've been hit with a spray of bullets - spreading bright red splotches across my cream jacket.

It's a disaster spotted across the terrace by maitre d' Luis Garcia. When a similar thing happened at a very glitzy three star in Paris - yes, it's amazing that I ever put on weight judging by how little food actually makes it to my mouth - a flock of waiters in tails descended and fussed over me in that “look at the gauche Australian” sort of a way that they must be taught in waiter school on the same day they learn “putting down Americans the de Gaulle way”. Here however Garcia sidles up and diffuses any embarrassment with a matter of fact demand for the jacket. This response breaks any remaining tension at being here.

So now in to one of the two beamed dining rooms for the dinner proper; the atmosphere is “library reading room” thanks to no music. The only sounds are people going“mmmmmmm”, people going “hmmmmmm?” and waiters issuing instructions on how each course should be approached. For each one of these little edible tableaux comes with terse bullet points on how to eat it perhaps as an insurance against customer breaking a tooth on the fluid-lined sculptures that act as plates here: “eat this in one bite”, “suck the flower but don't eat it”, “eat this leaf”, “two bites but don't eat the leaf”.

For chapter after chapter this epic goes on with the sort of breathless enthusiasm of a small child showing off all his new Christmas presents. It's a relentless assault, Adria's current culinary obsessions with Japan, with the soy bean, with sesame seeds and with the pine becoming increasingly clear as the meal progresses. There's a plate containing over a dozen different expression of the soy bean from sprouts and slimy fermented Japanese natto to miso, soy and what tastes like milky bean curd skin. While young pine needles come candied, pine milk is used to partner gin in a cocktail and you re-acquaint yourself with pine-nuts in little gel packets that you dip in a sort of sweet pine resin tea and then pop into your mouth. The packets dissolve on your tongue to deliver a pine nut praline, a pine nut butter and a pine nut oil. Wow!

These obsessions make for a slightly unbalanced meal. Some dishes are wonderful; bursting with flavour and turning your tongue inside out with unexpected textures and combination like little parmesan gel ravioli with coffee grains, a fat scampi that's raw at one end and golden-fried at the other, or a plate of “mimetic almonds”.Here a wedge of black olive dusted apricot sits amongst young green almond kernels, toasted almonds and various other similarly shaped“expressions of almondiness” with different textures such as the almond jellies, and even what the waiter confirms are the occasional apricot kernels.

Other jaw dropping moments revolve as much around the produce sourced as the techniques. A strange raw little leaf, Dutch-grown and dotted with dew drops of vinegar, tastes uncannily like oysters; petals from a rose imported from Ecuador fool you into thinking that they are artichoke leaves thanks to an artichoke vinaigrette. “Here, nothing is as it seems,” says the waiter who clears the plates as if quoting an El Bulli motto.

More perplexing is a giant hollow egg of frozen coconut cream where you eat the sweet shell sprinkled with curry powder. It's one of many examples of how Adria likes people to eat their fingers rather than cutlery and also how modern Spanish restaurants, like the French, struggle with the use of unfamiliar spices. The curry powder has a raw spice taste.

Overall the menu of 39 courses or tastes starts sweet and ends exploring iodine-like flavours in dishes like sliced almost raw tasting kidney and a mix of green tea, caviar and rather wibbly-wobbly heat-wilted tendrils of sea anemones that look like some phaser-blasted alien from Star Trek. Interesting maybe but both are distinctly un-yummy. They are not alone. There are other dishes that don't ring any bells for our party, like raw cockles with fennel and the flavour of yuzu, slabs of cooked jamon fat with abalone and poppy little sprigs of what we take as seaweed, and that plate of soy which seems far less exotic when viewed from an Australian rather than Spanish perspective.

This is El Bulli's first season after the departure of Ferran's brother and muse, Albert, from the long-held roll of pastry chef. Compared to the rest of the menu, for me desserts lacked lunacy, cohesion and the same breathless over-excitement. Even if entrees and snacks like the pineapple and olive “hankerchief” or a ice-cold (rather than iced) coconut sponge (made from what tasted like flavoured and foamed cocoa butter set with cold rather than heat into an “Aero” like texture) continue Adria's aim of blurring the lines between the sweet and savoury worlds. The most spectacular looking dessert - called “roots”because it looks like bonsai-sized tree roots in soil - is a jumble of chocolate and a Japanese citrus called yuzu never quite gels for me.

In the end El Bulli comes across like the culinary equivalent of the Paris catwalks with a new collection of dishes each year. While you might appreciate the cutting edge nature of what you see, nothing is turning up on your high street anytime soon. For example only now, almost three years after their debut at El Bulli, are Adria inventions like the foam-gun aerated sponge creeping on to Aussie fine dining menus.

This reckless desire to re-invent his menu every year is really what makes El Bulli special but it also ensures that it will reflect Adria's sometimes outlandish current culinary obsessions. You could also argue that his menu of 39 tastes could do with some serious culling to cutout dud dishes but in a way this would be self-defeating because you learn as much about Adria's approach to food from the mis-steps as the winning dishes.

What really makes eating here so fascinating fora foodie is that Adria sets the trends with his new techniques and ideas and you get to see them first. It's certainly not the décor!

At the end of the meal, El Bulli's irrepressible maitre d' Luis Garciareturns with my jacket, spotless. It's a little thing; another justification of El Bulli's status although it has to be admitted that a meal here is still largely about Adria's food - whether it is yummy or not.