Cooking in Progress' leaves you hungry for more

The restaurant El Bulli just outside Roses, Spain, the subject of this Gereon Wetzel documentary, is already cloaked in a kind of nostalgia. In 2010, after Mr. Wetzel had completed filming, Ferran Adria, the chef and co-owner of El Bulli, announced that the 2010-11 season would be the restaurant's last. Instead, he would focus his energies on a research foundation that would continue to push the boundaries of cuisine.

The restaurant had been named the "best in the world" five times on the prestigious Restaurant Magazine list. According to El Bulli's records, up to 2 million reservation requests were made each year for approximately 8,000 seats, while thousands of talented young chefs applied for the privilege of working for free for the acclaimed chef.

Mr. Wetzel followed the restaurant during its second-to-last season, filming the chef and his team for about 15 months. The shoot of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" began with the day a small team of chefs transferred a van full of equipment and documents to the restaurant's laboratory, where months would be spent exploring new ingredients and techniques before the chefs returned to re-open the restaurant for the second half of the year.

The first 53 or so minutes of the film follow Mr. Adria's team of chef-researchers as they perform precise experiments on a small set of ingredients, such as mushrooms, sweet potatoes and the citrus fruit yuzu, exploring different effects and combinations.

There are small moments of comedy: Mr. Adria steps through the doorway and is handed a small spoonful of food to taste before he has time to remove his coat or put down his keys. A hard-drive crashes, and a momentary crisis ensues: The experiments might be lost! A moment later it becomes clear that all the hard-copy notes are safe, but Mr. Adria continues to rant and rave, declaring, "This is a disaster!"

While there is little attempt to explore the relationships between the chefs, one thing is clear: Mr. Adria has the final word.

For the most part, the time in the laboratory is merely tedious, punctuated by the occasional glimmer of insight. One young chef traces the idea for adding shards of ice to a dish back to a meal he ate in Brazil, where a piece of ice fell into his plate of fish and sauce. But these moments of exposition are few and far between.

Voiceovers, narrative captions or even a less linear progression of events might have helped create a more coherent story. Instead, Mr. Wetzel attempts to follow a few ingredients from experiment to finished dish, but the chefs work so quickly, on so many different ideas, that it is difficult to pick out one idea from another.

The action picks up considerably once the chefs return to the restaurant, and Mr. Adria and the permanent staff begin to interact with the year's interns. As he welcomes the interns, Mr. Adria declares, "You will see the work day by day that it takes to be creative."

One of the best moments is a scene where Mr. Adria leads a seminar for the interns, exploring the ideas behind his cooking and the connection between the techniques and the emotions of food. "Going to eat in an avant garde restaurant gives you something like a creative emotion," he says. "It's not just mmm it tastes good. You feel something. ... For us the emotional elements have always been more important. But for that you sometimes need a certain technology."

The use of hand-held cameras and the apparent desire to document without interrupting keeps the filmmakers at a distance and makes it difficult to get a good grasp on any of the dishes. Happily, as the film progresses, discussions get more concrete, and we begin to learn a little bit more about the finished dishes that will work their way onto that season's menu: Vacuumized mushrooms with hazelnut oil; a ravioli whose pasta dissolves before it's eaten; a dish of olive oil and miniature tangerines with scattered shards of ice.

At the very end of the film, we finally get a good look at the food: A slideshow of luminous photographs shot for the restaurant by Francesc Guillamet documents the new dishes developed that season. The ends, in this case, did not quite justify the means. El Bulli was a fascinating restaurant, and many would appreciate a peek into it's inner workings. This film never gives us much more than a glimpse into the creative minds and talented hands at work.

In Catalan, with English subtitles. Opens today at The Harris Theater, Downtown.

First published on December 26, 2011 at 12:00 am