Ferran Adria. Photograph: Sophia Evans
... On a plate are served one quarter of a fennel bulb, an olive, a candied fruit and a tactile device. The diner eats the olive, then the candied fruit, then the fennel. Contemporaneously, he delicately passes the tips of the index and middle fingers of his left hand over the rectangular device, made of a swatch of red damask, a little square of black velvet and a tiny piece of sandpaper. From some carefully hidden melodious source comes the sound of part of a Wagnerian opera, and, simultaneously, the nimblest and most graceful of the waiters sprays the air with perfume.
The English have never been comfortable with the notion of public intellectuals. We feel a bit queasy when writers or scientists make ex cathedra pronouncements about ideas, and we can only deal with our own Heston Blumenthal as a combination of celebrity chef and comedy telly boffin, when he's clearly neither. So it's perhaps unsurprising that we have trouble knowing where to place Ferran Adria.
It's usual to describe him as a hybrid scientist/artist/inventor/cook, but in reality he's only one of these things - a cook first and foremost. The 'scientific' techniques he uses have been, in large part, used by the prepared food, snack or confectionary industries for many years - an air-filled corn-based, solid foam matrix dusted with an intense cheese powder might be a revelation to a wealthy food connoisseur but to the rest of us it's a Cheezy Wotsit - but in the hands of a cook of Adria's talents, a mouth-amusing novelty designed to delight small children can be subverted to astonish even the most jaded food lover.
In spite of the brooding portraits and the wordy proclamations, the abiding impressions from his food are fun, delight and even playfulness. Aside from all the public perception of gimmickry, never let it be forgotten that he's an astonishing cook.
But if Adria is to have a hybrid job title it should be cook/communicator. Throughout our interview for yesterday's G2 he kept returning to the importance of getting his ideas across. Feeding people is obviously fun but his abiding drive is to transmit some kind of message through it:
We're not going to close El Bulli but every single day we must face the challenge to re-invent the model through which we express ourselves. In the end, the important thing is what we say. Perhaps the model may change. Perhaps we just have a single table ... every 50 days ... to explain to the press what we're doing.
A restaurant is all very well, it seems, but if a point is reached where feeding customers interferes with communicating the message, then the doors can be closed.
Quite what the message is is rather more difficult to establish. Adria explains "... you can feel the emotion but you cannot intellectualise ... because you have not studied it. You must study El Bulli to understand it." So, obviously it's going to take some work.
There's certainly a wealth of material out there. Adria expresses himself assiduously via his regular appearances at culinary conferences - the annual Madrid Fusion conference has become a celebration of the supremacy of Spanish avant garde cooking and Adria's keynote speeches make it very much his show - and through the gorgeous and expensive books produced by his own publishing company.
Now, it appears, the message is about to become available to even more of us when Phaidon, the art book publishers, begin releasing affordable versions of his books in October of this year.
The opening quote? As I'm sure the more observant foodies will have spotted, it's not Adria's at all, it's from F T Marinetti's 'Futurist Cookbook' and was served at his restaurant The Holy Palate in 1932. It's included as a historical curiosity and as a reminder of what happens if the message ever gets more important than the food.
