What Will the World's Best Restaurant Become Next?

By Lisa Abend

Spanish cook Ferran Adrià taste tests a sauce in his restaurant elBulli in Roses, Spain.

"Make it new!" When poet Ezra Pound issued his 1934 manifesto to modern artists, he surely didn't have cooks in mind. But there is probably no creative force today who takes Pound's dictum more seriously than Spanish chef Ferran Adrià. After two decades spent revolutionizing modern cuisine, he and his business partner Juli Soler astonished the culinary world in January by announcing that they would close their restaurant elBulli for a two-year period of reflection from 2012, and reopen in a new format. Now, Adrià has detailed to TIME his plans to reinvent what many consider the most influential restaurant in the world. "In the 25-year history of elBulli, there have been five moments of rupture, and now it's time for another," says Adrià. "The one thing we can't have is monotony." (Why reservations just got tougher at the world's best restaurant.)

In the past, those ruptures involved opening only for dinner, or developing a workshop to test new ideas during the six months the restaurant is closed each year. This rupture will be more dramatic. Instead of a restaurant, elBulli will become a nonprofit foundation, operating as a think tank where talented young chefs will explore new directions in gastronomy. It's a subject with which Adrià, 47, and his team have ample experience. The chef will probably always be identified with radical innovations like potato foam and foie gras "noodles" frozen with liquid nitrogen. But more than any one dish or technique, he has changed the way that people think about food. Chefs around the world have adopted not only his dazzling concoctions, but his ethos - to bring science, art and cooking into closer collaboration, to use food not only to please and satiate but to amaze and provoke; and above all, to constantly reinvent. Fellow holder of three Michelin stars, chef Juan Mari Arzak defines Adrià's role simply: "He is the most important chef in the history of cuisine."

Adrià is careful to emphasize that he is not opening a culinary school. "This is about creativity more than cooking," he says. "We're not going to be teaching anyone how to break down a cod." The foundation will grant fellowships to 20 or 25 young cooks a year so that they may spend 12 months working with elBulli's core staff, investigating new techniques and developing new flavors. Discussions led by prominent chefs and leaders in art and design will complement their research. Each year, the foundation will release a book and video that catalogue its discoveries; a team will disseminate those ideas at chefs' conferences and culinary schools. The fellows will also help Adrià compile an encyclopedia on contemporary cuisine. To accommodate all this, elBulli will expand. The sleek, airy kitchen and homely dining room will remain untouched, but Adrià and Soler are meeting with architects to draw up plans for an audiovisual room and a library. The two have high ambitions for the foundation, which has already received interest from outside sponsors. "Our dream is that each year, we'll turn out one or two chefs who will be extremely important for the future of cuisine." (elBulli chef Ferran Adrià's Harvard science lesson.)

That's all well and good, but for the millions of gourmands who clamor for one of the 8,000 reservations the restaurant assigns in an annual lottery, the more pressing question is: Will there be anything to eat? "We're changing the economic model, and we're changing the reservation system," says Adrià. "But we're still going to be feeding people." How exactly they'll do that is yet to be decided. The restaurant will be open for a normal six-month season in 2010 and 2011, but after that, all bets are off. When it reopens in 2014, elBulli may offer impromptu tastings, Adrià says, and will serve roughly 60 meals a year in the formal style of a restaurant. Just don't ask him how they'll decide who gets in.

Why all the changes? Like many restaurants with three Michelin stars, elBulli does not make a profit (its principals support themselves with consulting, investments and speaking engagements), but Adrià says the financial burdens of the restaurant, as well as the obstacles it poses to family life, merely accelerated his decision, not determined it. His primary motivation was to maintain the creative spark. "Part of my job is to see into the future, and I could see that our old model is finished," he says. "It's time to figure out what comes next." (Read more)