Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 21

Chef Appeal 17 We are told that Adria works half the year in the Taller with a team composed of his brother, a chemist, and an industrial designer. They experiment and come up with new ideas in cuisine, often creating “impossible” dishes such as a bowl containing both a hot consomme of foie gras and a frozen-powder form of the same ingredient, both parts retaining their temperatures, and a so-called “pea ravioli” that maintains its state as a perfect bright-green sphere with no pasta or encasement other than one created from the ingredient itself As chemically inventive as the El Bulli team is, it is also pranksterishly witty. Take, for example, the “cherries with ham” dish that Bourdain featured of ham-fat glazed cherries masquerading as a more conventional preparation of white-fondant-covered cherries. Or, how about a play on magic tricks with an “Englishbread” that Bourdain described as appearing to be a loaf of Wonder Bread but shockingly vanishing once Bourdain placed it on his tongue? Each of the courses Bourdain imbibed was not only a proposition made provocative due to the preparation of the food but provocative also because of the designer’s engineering of