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.
