El Bulli: Cooking in Progress at MoMA

Wisely, we ate before heading to MoMA to see El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, another entry in the museum's Documentary Fortnight. Gereon Wetzel's movie follows Ferran Adrià and his crew as they invent new dishes for the most celebrated restaurant in the world. The creativity, knowledge, and culinary derring-do on display left the packed theater amazed, and while some of the ideas were hard to mentally taste, others --- cocktails made with fats, tangerines with oil and ice cubes, a frozen lake of mint --- set off more salivation than Pavlov ever dreamt of. A bit too meditative at times, the film nevertheless manages to avoid dull reverence by adding a pinch of humor: the scene where the staff tries to buy five individual grapes at the Boqueria Market is delightful, and the faces on the sous-chefs as they watch Adrià try their food would be at home in any absurdist comedy, where the stakes are trivial and the efforts and ingenuity anything but.

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