Culinary Creativity

This chapter focuses on creativity and food design at elBulli, Ferran Adrià’s world-leading restaurant in Catalunya, Spain. The chapter begins with an overview of creative processes at elBulli, before moving on to address the ‘Mental Palate’. The latter was elBulli’s term for the training, knowledge, and skill of the chef, as well as their personal tastes, and this section addresses how elBulli’s creative practice utilised, harnessed, and directed the ‘Mental Palate’ in the development of new dishes. The second half of the chapter turns to Derridean deconstruction as a creative-artistic-reflective approach at elBulli, exploring: creativity and copying/reproduction; representations and the real/natural; and challenging the seeming wholeness or unity of a dish or an ingredient. This chapter explores how elBulli’s work manifests an artistic thinking with and through gastronomy: an embodied, sensory, and intellectual relation between food and chef or diner, which is interrogatory, revelatory, and creative.