At this point, it's hard not to know that Ferran Adrià's famous restaurant, El Bulli closes on July 30. The food media has been covering its last days for some time now, and below is our round-up of El Bulli-related stories from the past few months.
Back in April, Noreen Malone at Slate wrote a piece calling out all the food writers and their I-Ate-At-El-Bulli-Pieces (IAAEBP). She warns, "Unless you can get Adrià to button you into a bib, deconstruct and foam-ify some sweet potatoes, and spoon feed them to you himself while making airplane zooming noises, your account will not surprise me, and will not satisfy me. I've read piece after piece and am still unfulfilled; the words, I fear, were all just so much foam." Be sure to check out Slate's El Bulli dish-name generator as well.
New York Magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt acknowledges the plethora of IAAEBP but nonetheless, scribed an entertaining read on “the mother of all boondoggles” courtesy Champagne company Dom Pérignon. He remarks, "Adrià’s dinners aren’t really dinners at all. They are elaborate, even exhausting, magic shows, filled with all kinds of dizzying, indulgent, and, in many cases, miraculous culinary special effects."
The food blog Eater has been following El Bulligeddon particularly closely. It has reported about everything from Adria's hope to open a foundation in China to his love of pencils.
On Monday, Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations El Bulli episode airs. Today, he penned a blog post feeling pretty gosh darn proud about the episode. "I don’t know if Monday’s episode is the best depiction of what the Adriàs did at El Bulli–though I’m pretty damn sure it is," he wrote.
So once El Bulli shuts its doors, what will happen? Chicago darling chef Grant Achatz has mentioned his desire to create an El Bulli menu that highlights one dish per year from 1983 through 2003. (And, given that he is present at the final dinner service, perhaps Adrià doesn't hate this idea?). Ferran Adrià certainly isn't going anywhere, and people can learn even more about the Spanish chef on the big screen with the new documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. And he is hoping to re-open El Bulli in 2014 as a culinary think tank -- Adrià emphasizes that El Bulli is not closing but instead transforming.
The Guardian would like to remind foodies that, in fact, "the world is not coming to an end," although for a select group of "gastronomic cognoscenti, something nearly as bad is about to happen."