What it’s like to eat at one of the best restaurants in the world?
We humans always have been fascinated by awe-inspiring experiences. Since ancients times, explorers and artists had found worthy the risk of entry to new fields with the hope of discovering something. With the past of time and the advances in science and technologies, they are less external experiences that can generate genuine awe in us. Basically, nothing impresses us, nothing gets us out of our comfort zone. We believe we just can google everything.
That informational arrogance comes with a dangerous dark side: the laziness to expand our perception. Travel, technology and food are some of the few areas we are delivering using to experience more awe in our lives, defined as the emotion that arises when one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). What Neil deGrasse Tyson calls the cosmic perspective, where we see the big picture, and we are reset, we are transformed. It forces to re-accommodate our mental models of the world in order to assimilate the experience.
A study out of Stanford University on the subject of awe found that regular incidences in which we experience awe leave in us increased feelings of compassion, empathy, altruism and general well-being. In other words, getting your mind blown is good for you.
In 2014, I made a research about how a small restaurant on the remote costa brava in Spain was named 5 times the best restaurant in the world and Ferran Adria one of the most influential chefs have ever existed. After going deep into El Bulli’s creative process, I found fascinating how they applied the concepts of lean startups, design thinking, user experience and agile way before those concepts exist in IT, to build the legacy of this iconic restaurant. I made a short talk at the CanUX that year titled How El Bulli turned dining into an experience. After the talk, one of the most common questions I got was: “What it’s like to eat at El Bulli?” Unfortunately, I could not respond to that question because the restaurant has closed in 2011.
Just after El Bulli closed, Ferran’s brother, Albert Adria and former creative director, opened a new restaurant in Barcelona named Tickets: initially planned as a traditional tapas restaurant, but after El Bulli fans quickly set the expectations, Tickets pivot to Avant-Garde Cuisine and start it raise to the top. Albert Adria was named The World’s Best Pastry Chef 2015 and Tickets one of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2018. You can see more details on the Netflix series Chef’s Table: S05 E04. (highly recommend)
This fall, after years of wondering me, I have the chance to finally response the original question: What it’s like to eat at one of the best restaurants in the world?
But before the food experience, let me share some facts about avant-garde restaurants:
- Get a table at Tickets is not easy. Mark Zuckerberg and Lionel Messi are some of their famous visitors. It not impossible difficult as it was for El Bulli, but required 3 or 4 months to book in advance. We were extremely lucky to arrive without a reservation and get the help of Albert Adria itself to find a table. Maybe I’ll share how I made that happen in another post.
- Once you are at the table, you can choose to order your plates from the menu but that will limit the experience to your knowledge of the Avant-Garde Cuisine. We choose for the degustation menu selected by the waitress based on our preferences and allergies.
- Be ready to stay and eat for at least 3 hours. Portions are small, often you ended with one or two bites but you will try a large number of dishes and desserts.
- You will feel a weird sensation of being fool by the food, but you will love it.
- This is not a regular price dinner. You don’t have to take a second mortgage to pay for it but count with a bill x3 to x4 more expensive than a regular fancy dinner. We can debate about the ROI of this, but sometimes we pay for expensive food that is basically garbage or for example, in Singapore, we pay only $3 for a Michelin star dish at the legendary Liao Fan Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice. All is relative of how it makes you feel at the end.
Back to Tickets, the decoration resembles the time of Circus and Willy Wonka, with lights and colorful posters
As all El Bulli descendent restaurants, the first dish is always the iconic Spherical Olives. From there we moved into mussels, tuna, iberico ham, and more. Really I don’t remember the exact names or ingredients but they were by far some of the most delicious dishes I ever eat.
They were around 20 dishes we eat that night, all with the same common features: great presentation, remarkable ingredient quality, perfect size, easy to eat, surprise elements, awesome choreography order, and mind-blowing flavors. Another surprise is you don’t feel you eat too much.
When we were ready to end with a simple dessert, the waitress invited us to follow her to another room (the sweet room)
If you eat at the restaurant of the one of the World’s Best Pastry Chef, you can expect the desserts will be something special.
Yes, indeed. We enter a private room out of a Willy Wonka dream just for desserts. There we eat Spherical Rose, Margarita’s foam and four more desserts.
In total were 26 dishes.
Back to the hotel, we reflect on what just had happened and realize that what we had experienced was an awe-inspiring moment. The level of surprise and delight is something difficult to express in words, is more like enter into a flow state or get hight with a psychedelic drug. But the most remarkable is the increased urgency to make something great, to be creative and make something good with your time and knowledge. The inspiration we get from places like Tickets can motivate us to look deep in our passions and start to make something about it.
For food, we saw the big picture, we were reset, we were transformed.
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
References
- Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 17, 297–314.
- Melanie R., Kathleen D., Jennifer A. (2012). Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time and Enhances Well-Being. Psychological Science. Vol. 23, Issue 10, Pages 1130–1136
- Solano, J. (2014). How El Bulli restaurant turned dining into an experience — a UX case study
Like this post? Great! Follow me on Medium or Twitter @solanojuan.
It would be cool if you hit “Recommend” on this post too. Thanks!
Also by J. P. Solano
- David Heinemeier shares some principles to go against the grain
- It’s the Platform that matters, not the App.
- Things you want to know before developing a SaaS product
- Commute Self-Awareness
- Entrepreneurs, Credibility and The Sinatra Test
- 8 reasons why every entrepreneur should do the Spartan Race
- Stephen King’s Top 20 rules for writers applied to entrepreneurs
- The Stress Paradox
- 10 Lessons learned at 99u IDEO’s studio session
- How “elBulli” turned dining into an experience
- Share your idea, nobody will care anyway
- Why not take advantage of yourself?
- Unleash your inner superhero
