
Some meals fade from our memories as soon as the plates are cleared, while others are remembered for a lifetime. For Brett Littman, the executive director of the Drawing Center, a New York art institution dedicated to exhibiting drawings, it was a wondrous eight-hour dinner in 2010 at elBulli, the famed three-Michelin-star restaurant located in Roses, Spain, helmed by Spanish chef Ferran AdriĂ , that stayed with him.
After taking over the elBulli kitchen in the mid-â80s, AdriĂ would carefully plot out the now-shuttered restaurantâs 35+-course tasting menus. Through drawings, diagrams, and models, he composed innovative dishes that used molecular gastronomy to create mind-blowing experiences, like a dry martini sprayed into the mouth from a container modeled after a Comme des Garçons perfume bottle, or the famed spherical olives made of a green olive solution in a jelly-like shell that burst in your mouth. âIt was just a part of the daily work we were doing,â said AdriĂ through a translator. âIt helps [to] visualize the dish before you do it, it helps you with your daily process, it helps putting it together.â

Littmann found his dining experience to be so profound and exciting that he reached out to AdriĂ about the possibility of exhibiting his process at the Drawing Center. AdriĂ agreed, and for the past two years Littman traveled to Barcelona four times so that the pair could work together to cull drawings and ephemera from AdriĂ âs archive for the exhibition, Ferran AdriĂ : Notes on Creativity, which runs at the Drawing Center through February 28, before it heads to Los Angeles, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Maastricht, the Netherlands.
âHis process and everything that he does is in service of creativity,â said Littmann. âVisualization, drawing, list making, diagramsâare very much at the basis of the way that he expresses himself. I think that he wouldnât have been able to make 1,846 new dishes in the history of gastronomy unless this whole visual world existed as the foundation.â

Ferran AdriĂ : Notes on Creativity is a paradigm shifting exhibition that changes the way we look at the conception of the intricate recipes served at elBulli by displaying AdriĂ âs drawings and visual creative process as art. âIt will give people a different vision of creativity in the kitchen,â AdriĂ explained. âPeople donât just imagine whatâs behind all the work that we do.â
The planning process involved in creating the complex dishes that gave elBulli its reputation as one of the worldâs best restaurants involved a team of around 45 people, including graphic designer Marta MĂ©ndez Blaya and industrial designer Luki Haber. At the Drawing Center, a series of vitrines displays concept sketches out of AdriĂ âs notebooks, the three-dimensional plasticine models that were formed in the kitchen, the innovative serving vessels designed by the elBulli team, and colorful diagrams detailing plating ideas. For the exhibition, styrofoam boards just like the ones used in the elBulli atelier show illustrated instructions on how to create each dish, along with a photograph of the finished product, and are propped up against walls comprised of large-scale photographs of the elBulli library. Also in the exhibit is a caricature of AdriĂ by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, as well as a Polaroid by the chef of the late British artist Richard Hamilton, an elBulli regular who connected AdriĂ to the art world.

AdriĂ will be spending plenty of time in the United States this year. On February 15, the Museum of Science in Boston will open elBulli: Ferran AdriĂ and The Art of Food, an exhibition that focuses on the restaurantâs evolution. âThey are two different exhibitions, two different ways of seeing the art of cooking,â said AdriĂ . And this spring Phaidon is releasing a mammoth seven-volume, 2,720-page catalogue raisonĂ©e, elBulli: 2005-2011, that details all the recipes and techniques of the restaurant from its final seven years. Just donât try to make them at home. AdriĂ said that the set is meant to be more of an archive. âPeople wouldnât think of making avant-garde cuisine at home,â he said, comparing them to the best in another field. âWhen people play basketball at home, they canât play like Michael Jordan.â
Ferran AdriĂ : Notes on Creativity is on display at the Drawing Center through February 28.