Chapter 0: Ferran Adrià

What is Sapiens? How was it born? What’s the objective? Can it be extrapolated to other subjects beyond gastronomy?

In chapter 0 of “Connecting knowledge”, Ferran Adrià tells how, after the closure of the elBulli restaurant, he conceived Sapiens. How a methodology that served to understand gastronomy could be focused in such a way that it could serve any discipline.

This is how Ferran Adrià explains how his interest in connecting knowledge from different areas arose, the genesis of the Sapiens methodology:

“When I closed the restaurant, we took two and a half years of sabbatical, to put it in some way, to understand what we did. What did we do? Cooking… and creating.

Then I thought that this was going to be fast, that I was going to do it in no time, maybe in a year. Well, it took me seven or eight years. We started pulling the thread, the thread, the thread… and we saw that we had to start… that we had to connect many issues, or it was impossible to understand it”

Ferran Adrià was, along with Juli Soler and Albert Adrià, the leader of elBullirestaurant for more than twenty years. Starting in the fall of 2011, he started creating the elBullifoundation project, a change in his professional life, focusing on a more global, holistic and theoretical vision of innovation and, consequently, management for small and medium-sized companies. This vision evolved to what it is today, giving rise to the Sapiens methodology. He is currently the president of elBullifoundation.