The Sorcerer's Apprentices

January 31, 2011
For years, chef Adrià'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 Adrià (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 Adrià's apprentices. Weaving the history of the restaurant and Adrià'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.