El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

This glossy documentary by German filmmaker Gereon Metzel documents a year behind the scenes of fabled restaurant El Bulli. We watch the chefs developing recipes in a lab, then see the restaurant kitchen in production. Chef Ferran Adrià & his colleagues know each other so well that they don't need to talk much, & the kitchen, though busy, necessarily runs with a quiet efficiency, so the film is weirdly deadpan. There are no interviews or commentary, so I remained unenlightened about the cooking methods & ingredients I saw. But then Chef Adrià does lecture his new staff that the purpose of an avant-garde restaurant is to confuse the diners.

§ El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2011)
in Catalan, Spanish & French; 108 min
director, Gereon Wetzel