Catalan chef Ferran Adrià has always advocated the importance of treating customers all equally. His philosophy is based on fairness and the ability to adapt to circumstances, yet in a recent interview he revealed that over the course of his career at ElBulli, there has been a deviation from the rule for a special person.
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It has now been more than a decade since Ferran Adrià retired from the kitchen and the story of ElBulli has ended - at least in its restaurant guise now, in fact, it has become a museum - although the desire to extract a few anecdotes from the years of fervor of the temple of molecular cuisine (a definition that Adrià dislikes) has not subsided.
In a recent interview with La Vanguardia, the Catalan chef -among the fathers of contemporary world gastronomy, emblazoned like few of his colleagues -said he never granted any favoritism when it came to reservations. Despite endless waiting lists and customers from all over the world, the system for reserving a table was only one and anyone eager to taste his cuisine had to play by those rules.
In telling that he has always disdained the begging of celebrities and influencers, who, over the years have tried to dine at ElBulli by “skipping the line,” Adrià has, however, revealed the one exception, which bears the name of Johan Cruijff. "I never let anyone in without a reservation, but with Cruijff it was different. I admired him very much. He was the Steve Jobs of soccer. He is the only one who was great both when he played and when he coached. He changed soccer," confided Adrià, referring to the Dutchman who is considered one of the best players and coaches in soccer history.
Perhaps this breaking of the rules was a gift from the Catalan chef to the child and teenager Ferran Adrià, when he dreamed of playing in the big leagues. "When I was playing soccer I thought I was good, that I was going to the big leagues. Then my coach told me, 'You are good, but you will never go to the World Cup.' That's when I learned something fundamental...To get ahead, you can't rely on your own judgment of yourself. You have to have the humility to ask those who know more, 'Am I good or not?' and, only after listening to the answer, think about what you can become. I never had a vocation, a mission. I wanted to become a soccer player. Then, in 1980, I decided to spend my vacation in Ibiza: since my father would not give me a penny, I got a job as a dishwasher. In the mornings I slept, in the evenings I worked, and at night I went to clubs to pick up girls. That's where it all started,” , he told, some time ago, to Marie Claire.
In the same interview to the question, “Is it true that you don't make anyone jump the queue, not even Juan Carlos?” he replied, "Far be it from me to sound conceited, but I'm not the one taking reservations.... I've already told him: to me, all customers are equal.". The desire of Adrià - who now spends most of his time training the next generation of chefs, so much so that he founded the Madrid Culinary Campus with fellow chef Andoni Luis Aduriz - has always been to want to accommodate diners who know how to wait for the times and appreciate the value of waiting as an integral part of the experience itself.
So did Pep Guardiola, Xavi Hernández and Txiki Begiristain who enjoyed his cooking and understood and appreciated his vision. As a great soccer fan and unabashed Barcelona supporter, he then recalls the time he prepared “Neapolitan scallop with tomato and cheese” for Lionel Messi: “We had a great time,”, he comments. The intertwining of his passion for cooking and soccer, despite his retirement from the stove, makes him later say, "Today I would gladly cook for Barça's young prodigy, Lamine Yamal, only 17 years old. What he is doing at his age is crazy. Not even Messi did it at his age".
