Ferran Adria famous quotes

Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster.
-- Ferran Adria

#Food #Lobster #Sardines

Food is about being happy -- at a table, thats probably where we spend most of our happiest hours...
-- Ferran Adria

#Tables #Hours

Could you imagine people eating a painting -- if they could introduce a painting into their bodies? It's probably the artist's dream, and we have the opportunity to do so.
-- Ferran Adria

#Dream #Artist #Opportunity

If you think well, you cook well.
-- Ferran Adria

#Thinking #Cooking #Cooks

Like all disciplines where information is shared and work contributes to their advancement, cuisine should be no different. The kitchen is our life, and we are available to share. We want to share our work so that future generations can cook and create a more efficient, easy and unquestionable quality.
-- Ferran Adria

#Discipline #Cooking #Kitchen

You can see it on the Internet now. New society demands that people share their knowledge. It's asking multimillionaires to share their money and creative people to share their creativity. Whoever doesn't share their wealth, be it knowledge, money, or creativity, will be dead.
-- Ferran Adria

#Creativity #People #Creative

I am not a multimillionaire. I dont own a yacht or a Ferrari. I live in a 60-square- metre flat. My needs are simple.
-- Ferran Adria

#Simple #Squares #Ferrari

Risk is to do something that 99 percent of the time would be a failure.
-- Ferran Adria

#Risk #Would Be

Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food.
-- Ferran Adria

#Thinking #Blue #Sky

I have a drivers licence, but the truth is that I hardly ever drive. I prefer to get around by taxi.
-- Ferran Adria

#Truth Is #Taxi #Drivers

For me to go to a restaurant and eat something that is not only good, but totally new, is a double thrill. Double the enjoyment.
-- Ferran Adria

#Thrill #Restaurants #Enjoyment

I cant live without activity; I cant be sedentary.
-- Ferran Adria

There are a lot of products still to be discovered in the world and experimentation, for example with seafood and fish. There are thousands of products that we're not eating right now that maybe will be cultivated in a good agriculture situation, a sustainable, ecological way. Maybe there will be textures or flavors we hadn't even thought of. In the Amazon there are 400 fruits that are not cultivated right now. They're just incredible fruits. Textures, tastes that we don't know right now.
-- Ferran Adria

#Food #Agriculture #Example

The person who's receiving the food cooks as much as the chef. They have a very important role to play.... There's no other activity that the person who receives it can destroy the work, can participate in how it's being done. It's emotional. Sometimes journalists are going to have to start talking more about the diners than the chefs.
-- Ferran Adria

#Emotional #Talking #Play

What you feel like eating at any given moment is what you should have.
-- Ferran Adria

#Moments #Eating #Should

If I don't have pressure, I don't function.
-- Ferran Adria

#Pressure #Function

I use the kitchen as a pathway to achieve this happiness.
-- Ferran Adria

#Cooking #Kitchen #Pathways

You cannot get an influence from the cuisine of a country if you don't understand it. You've got to study it.
-- Ferran Adria

#Country #Cuisine #Study

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.
-- Ferran Adria

#Innovation #Avant Garde #Polemics

It's very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it's merely about combining ingredients, but that's something you can do with your eyes closed.
-- Ferran Adria

#Eye #Discipline #Ingredients

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.
-- Ferran Adria

#Expression #Cooking #Avant Garde

We didnt create dishes. We create preparations to create many dishes.
-- Ferran Adria

#Preparation #Dishes

I don't do my mother's cooking. Because I am a professional and she isn't. Even if she is a better cook.
-- Ferran Adria

#Mother #Cooking #Cooks

What's wrong with transforming food?
-- Ferran Adria

#Transforming

When people think science and cooking, they have no idea that it's not correctly expressed. We're actually applying the scientific method. People think chemistry and physics are science, but the scientific method is something else.... It's the science that the world of cooking generates: science of butter; science of the croissant.
-- Ferran Adria

#Thinking #Ideas #People

I never cook at home. After 15 hours at work, I don't have much of a desire to cook at home. I do eat at home, but it's always something simple. Raw nuts. Almonds, hazelnuts, pine nuts--these are marvelous products. I am, however, the type that likes to go out to eat a lot. I never tire of it.
-- Ferran Adria

#Home #Simple #Nuts

People need to understand. If they go to a show on Broadway and find seventy people working but only fifty spectators, how much would the ticket cost? That's what El Bulli's about. There are seventy actors who are playing for just fifty spectators. Is the price expensive? It's relative. How much does a normal dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant cost? Four hundred dollars. It's the same as El Bulli. But you can also think of it this way: How much would it cost to eat something that nobody else is eating?
-- Ferran Adria

#Stars #Thinking #People

In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference.
-- Ferran Adria

#Differences #Cooking #Avant Garde

There's a little treat I like a lot called Bollycao. It's like a brioche with chocolate inside, but industrial.
-- Ferran Adria

#Chocolate #Littles #Treats

When I go to a fine dining restaurant, I'm excited and I do expect to find proposals to wake my senses.
-- Ferran Adria

#Dining #Excited #Proposal

In my early days, I copied the great French chefs, like most chefs do. Copying is not bad. Copying and not recognizing that you are copying is bad. For me, when I go to a restaurant and am served a dish influenced by something we created at elBulli, if it's well done, it makes me extremely happy.
-- Ferran Adria

#Copying #Done #Chef

A chef is a chef, a cook is a cook; a lorry driver is a lorry driver and a designer is a designer. I've never heard anyone say that Philippe Starck is a chef. The important thing is dialogue. If I said to Norman Foster that he was a chef he'd say "No", but he might have a dialogue with chefs. People have said to me for many years that I'm not a chef and that I'm an artist instead, but I always say, "No, I'm a chef." I just have dialogues with designers.
-- Ferran Adria

#Artist #Years #People

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.
-- Ferran Adria

#Art #Mean #Thinking

You need an entire life just to know about tomatoes.
-- Ferran Adria

#Needs #Tomatoes

Chefs have only been able to work in restaurants, high-end cuisine. Why? Why haven't they been able to find other scenarios? For those chefs who want to do avant-garde cuisine, should they be finding their income in a restaurant? These are the kind of questions we are asking ourselves. So the new scenario will allow them to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it.
-- Ferran Adria

#Income #Avant Garde #Asking

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.
-- Ferran Adria

#Cutting #Year End #Years

Creativity means not copying.
-- Ferran Adria

#Creativity #Mean #Copying

When a customer receives a dish, they get food and design at the same time.
-- Ferran Adria

#Design #Dishes

Our kitchen is a kitchen that makes food designed to be tasted with the five senses and it requires concentration to appreciate all that we want to express.
-- Ferran Adria

#Appreciate #Kitchen #Five Senses

We opened El Bulli; there were no secrets there. The recipes were not secret. Anybody who came, the recipes were there for them. This was unthinkable then.
-- Ferran Adria

#Secret #Recipes #Unthinkable

There is not a good or a bad cuisine, just the one you like the best.
-- Ferran Adria

#Cooking #Cuisine

El Bulli was created by 2,000 people that passed through it. And we didn't know that something big was happening. It was like a game in a way. You didn't really know how it was going to end up, and people who would leave, they would take a piece of it with them, but they would leave another piece behind.
-- Ferran Adria

#Games #People #Pieces

In more day-to-day restaurants, things have undergone a seismic change towards informality and sharing, which has been years in the making. Nowadays, people don't want just one dish; they want to order lots of things and they want to do it in fun places, places that give them an experience. The experience that a restaurant needs to offer is no longer just based around the food.
-- Ferran Adria

#Fun #Order #Years

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.
-- Ferran Adria

#Photography #Art #Jobs

People wouldn't think of making avant-garde cuisine at home. When people play basketball at home, they can't play like Michael Jordan.
-- Ferran Adria

#Basketball #Home #Thinking

I don't worry about the things I can't change.
-- Ferran Adria

#Worry

You may say, "Oh, no. You can't touch a traditional recipe." But we ask: why can't you? Back in 1350, a vinaigrette was a stew, so we ask, why not? This can be applied to any kind of cooking, and that's the shocking part of it. It kind of bends all the traditions. It's a good thing.
-- Ferran Adria

#Cooking #Why Not #Recipes

We'll work with any designer producing something linked to gastronomy. So a chair for the dining area, a van to move food around. Anything that's connected to the gastronomic process.
-- Ferran Adria

#Moving #Dining #Designer

We knew the time would come that we'd have to step down because we'd been winning Oscars for 15 years. I discovered this one day when I got home, my mother was reading a newspaper and she said, 'Again? What are you doing in the papers?' And I realized if my mother thought that of me, what would my enemies think?
-- Ferran Adria

#Mother #Reading #Home

My idol was Johann Cruyff (a Dutch soccer player) and I wanted to be like him. But when I realized that I would never be, I decided to do something else. I met the kitchen by chance and quickly became completely enamoured by it.
-- Ferran Adria

#Soccer #Player #Idols

If you go off the edge, it's not cooking anymore, so you have to push it to the limit.... What are the limits?
-- Ferran Adria

#Cooking #Limits

I think my virtue was I never thought "This is impossible.
-- Ferran Adria

#Thinking #Impossible #Virtue

You can't please everyone, especially if you're doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That's life; it's a polemic I've lived with since I started cooking.
-- Ferran Adria

#Cooking #Vanguard #Polemics

I'm not a materialist, I don't care for things. I don't like cars, I hate things that can be exploited. I live a simple life. The only luxuries I have in my life are travel and food.
-- Ferran Adria

#Hate #Simple #Luxury

Throughout the history of el Bulli, there have been many changes in its organisation or philosophy. This is another one of those moments. There will be risk, and freedom, and creativity. But there won't be opening hours, or reservations, or routines.
-- Ferran Adria

#Philosophy #Creativity #Risk

I don't have a favorite cooking tool. In the kitchen, I always have my pencil and notebook in my hand. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical. The pencil has a symbolic meaning for me. The type of person who carries a pencil around is the type of person who's open to change. Someone who walks around with a pen isn't; he's the opposite.
-- Ferran Adria

#Notebook #Jobs #Creativity

Salt is the only product that changes cuisine. There's a big difference between food that has salt and food without it. If you don't believe that, ask people who can't eat salt.
-- Ferran Adria

#Believe #Differences #People

There's so much information that there is disinformation.
-- Ferran Adria

#Information