For four days in February 2024, the wild culinary creativity of Albert and Ferran Adrià landed in Copenhagen and merged with the holistic mindset of Alchemist’s Rasmus Munk.
The event consisted of three exclusive dinners and a cutting-edge culinary symposium, open to the public. After the news of the dinners was posted online, Alchemist received thousands of applications to participate, so a ticket lottery was created to allocate the few places available.
The dinners offered an extensive menu with dishes from Alchemist, Enigma and, exclusively, the Enigma and Alchemist kitchen teams recreated a selection of historical dishes from different periods of elBulli’s 25-year history.
As reinforcement for the dinner two “Bullinians”: Albert Raurich (former head chef at el Bulli, now at Dos Palillos) and Rafa Zafra (head chef at Hacienda Benazuza, who accompanied Albert Adrià at Heart, and now heads Estimar), who added two dishes of their own to make up the 44 impressions that diners received.
The number was not chosen at random, it was the same number of dishes that were served at the last elBulli dinner.
As a prelude, the day before, the ‘Beyond the plate 2024’ symposium on the legacy of El Bulli was held in the Concert Hall on the grounds of the iconic Tivoli, connecting the past with the future in terms of culinary creativity and conveying this synergy to an audience of around 1,000 guests and a large number of students from Danish culinary schools representing the future of hospitality.
The event included speeches, among others, by Harold McGee (the renowned science and cuisine populariser), who told his vision of the legacy of the Adriàs and recalled the differences between the Nouvelle Cuisine revolution and the one that had Cala Montjoi as its epicentre.
© Albert Adrià, 2024
