Checking It Out

My kitchen is well stocked with various gadgets, pots and pans. My bookshelves are crammed with a weird mixture of cookbooks - both for food and for Photoshop. My browser favorites files burst with a wide range of culinary blogs, food sections of national newspapers and food porn. But before there was all that, there was the Library. I love libraries. An incredible resource especially if you have control issues walking into a Borders or Barnes & Noble. Luckily I live in a county that has an excellent library system. Even their trucks are cool.But I didn't realize how good my library was until I saw Ferran Adrià's A Day at elBulli on the shelf. 600 pages of text, photos and recipes, it's not really a cookbook unless you're plugged into the "Adrià/elBulli way" of cooking. It's more a book of philosophy.That line about chefs should be better tasters is particularly fascinating when you think about how many times we've heard some poor Top Chef contestant try and explain why their dish tasted like crap.Oh yeah, Ferran, I struggle with that last one all the time.I really love the belief of making the chef, the waiter and the guest all equal parts of the production of a great dish. A total experience, each important to the process.

Of course, all this deep culinary thinking recently became a bit confuzzled. You see elBulli is only open for 6 months out of the year and only open for dinner. Each year approximately 8,200 guests dine at the restaurant compared to the two million requests they receive. Now in 2008 it cost € 200 (about $316 US) for the tasting menu. Sounds like a bargain to me for the restaurant voted Best Restaurant in the World but what it didn't do was cover the costs of making that meal. In January Adrià announced he would be closing elBulli, in part because they were losing half a million euros a year. Suddenly a whole lot of Foodie Bucket Lists took a big hit. Here's hoping your library is as extensive as mine and you can at least check out Adrià's book. You might even try your hand at making Mango and Black Olive Discs but good luck borrowing 25 grams of Isomalt from your next door neighbor.