This installation is the work of the industrial designer Luki Huber, who was a core member of the elBulli creative team between 2002 and 2005. It explores the complexity involved in each experience present in a high-quality fine-dining restaurant.

Ferran Adrià used cooking as a language to express himself. He formalised his approached into a kind of philosophy with the intention of not only appealing to the organoleptic dimension, sensory perception and memory, but also to other human dimensions: reason, emotions and spirituality.

We would even go so far as to say that few experiences are more complex than the one that takes place in a fine-dining restaurant when the executors of the offering and its recipients conduct themselves with perfection.

All the physical processes connect with the cognitive processes in our minds. Both the basic cognitive processes of sensory perception, attention, concentration and memory and the complex cognitive processes of intelligence, thought and language interact in an absolutely unimaginable way.

elBullirestaurante’s mission was to push the boundaries of the gastronomic experience and open up new avenues by sharing the creations and knowledge achieved throughout the entire process.

The tasting menu was intended to be a comprehensive entity, where each elaboration would interact with the others to form a connected whole. Different elaborations were designed to be combined, and their meaning exclusively depended on the existence of the others in that particular combination. This led to the creation of sequences of elaborations with multiple purposes, such as provoking diners, stirring debate, arousing emotions and encouraging reflection, among others.

Furthermore, in order to understand what the experience is and how it affects diners, we first had to clearly identify the gastronomic offering, which – contrary to popular belief – was much more than the food and beverages.

In the same way that the concept of ‘offering’ is very broad, we understand the ‘gastronomic experience’ to be the set of events that occur when an individual or group of individuals visit an establishment. The customers not only enjoy the food and beverage elaborations, but also the remaining elements that comprise the offering that the restaurant has designed for them, including the way they are treated, location, level of comfort and explanation of the elaborations given, to name just a few.

This explains why, although the tasting of the elaborations can justify a visit to a specific establishment, it is not the only point to consider when the guests choose where to dine.

Can anybody top that?