Experimentation and beyond.

(This post is part of Ferran Adria week. Don't know what that is? Inform yourself.)

"Ferran and his creative team--even at the Taller--basically tried everything, however unlikely, not knowing what would work and what wouldn't, or why some things did or didn't. Using intuition and imagination, they discovered new techniques by trial and error, and occasionally sheer luck. "We have never ascribed any scientific origin to our creations which have come about from a purely culinary quest.

One aspect of El Bulli that set them apart from other restaurants of the time was the Taller, their workshop. It was where they developed new concepts and techniques. Not new recipes, necessarily, but new ways of presenting food to diners. 

"First the concept, then the flavor." - Ferran Adria

Oriol Castro, "first comes the concept, like the chassis on a car. then we build on it."

This is almost almost identical to the way people in advertising develop ideas. First the idea, then the execution. The concept informs how the final result should be. I don't know of any other way.

A TABLE OF POSSIBILITIES.
Given El Bulli's approach to discovery it was important to them to know exactly how each product could be used. So in 1990, after purchasing the restaurant from the original owners, Ferran created "The Table of Associations."

"The table of associations: he made one list of all the available products, another of viable cooking techniques, a third of vinaigrettes, a fourth of emulsions, a fifth of herbs and spices, and so on, and from them, the two (Ferran and Head Chef at the time Xavier Sagrista) would try every possible combination of elements." "This process led to a flurry of charts and other lists, in which every element of cuisine was broken down and catalogued, as if there were a culinary genome, a DNA of cuisine."

But even with all this prep (six months of every year were devoted to experimentation), experimentation wasn't the point, it's the means. El Bulli wasn't asking people to admire the technique as much as their visceral and emotional reaction to the dish. It was about the end product, not the means by which it was developed. 

This is a lesson the ad industry could use. Too many ads these days are about the making of, showing how cool or difficult it was do do something. This is an inclination that I understand. It feels very important when you're making something and some people honestly enjoy the behind the scenes stuff. But the people behind the scenes—especially the creatives—are not the point. The product, the message, those are supposed to be the point.

THE BRIEF
Here is Ferran's brief for discovering/testing new dishes. It struck me how similar it looks to ad briefs. It's all about distillation of information. Narrowing the challenge enough so that a solution presents itself. Their briefs are tight and,  even though they weren't trying to develop a global campaign for a Fortune 500 company, it's a nice way to approach rewriting briefs if you ever have to do that.

Problem: mar i muntanya (sea and mountain, a cornerstone of Catalan cooking)
Idea: caviar and marrow
Definition of dish: marrow with caviar
Gathering of information: Is there something like it already? Has someone already done it?
Analysis of information: how can we make it?
Creativity: How can we combine the elements in the right form?
Materials and technology: What caviar should we use? How and where do we cook the marrow?
Experimentation: testing, trying things out
Final test: Tasting until it gets to the right point
Making it at the restaurant: Finding ways to reproduce what we've created."
A TEAM EFFORT
There was another aspect that made El Bulli special: all of El Bulli's experiments were a team effort. Even though they had this genius at the front of the room he thought everything was best through a team effort. (But I believe this was an innate trait and not necessarily something that can be enforced on an organization.)

Even in the Taller it was important that everyone could exchange ideas freely without fear of who the boss was or wasn't.

"Every Thursday, "more or less," while he was there, says Kirby [Colin Kirby 2008 stagiare] the stagiares were invited to join in a creativity session. "Ferran would come for thirty or forty-five minutes," he continues, "just playing with ideas. He'd give us two ingredients and the next week everyone was allowed to share their ideas with him, no matter how crazy or irrelevant." Sometimes, an idea would make the cut and end up being incorporated or adapted into the menu."

Note that this only extended to the kitchen. It was not the server's responsibilities to help develop techniques. But there was a certain meritocracy where the idea, not politics or experience, were the most important part of everyone's jobs.

NOBLE FAILURES
Occasionally, the most important dishes at El Bulli were the worst received. They were new. They were different. They were strange. Out of these, however, came the techniques that would eventually spread across the world. Because they established a precedent and then allowed for success to be built on the failures. One such dish was Smoke Foam (I know, it doesn't sound good to me either.

 "Smoke foam was the dish I have liked least at El Bulli, but it was the most important dish, because it made a gas into a solid. It was a clear expression of Ferran's message: 'Everything is possible.'" - Pau Arenos, cookbook author.

Because this technique led to other, better iterations of a dish it was important enough. Which is a huge luxury not afforded to most restaurants. But if experimentation and pushing boundaries is the goal, which they were at El Bulli, those thing have to be built into the system.

EXPERIMENTERS. NOT SCIENTISTS.
It is important to note that even with all of these experimentations, the chefs at El Bulli were not scientists.

David Weitz, director of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, "Chefs tend to try something, and if it doesn't work they move on to something else. We keep at it, we try to understand why it doesn't work and figure out a way to make it work. Our whole belief is that if we can understand something we can make it better. Chefs just want to know how to get the results."

Which is also true, I think, of ad creatives and the ad industry as a whole. As much as people try to make creative advertising out to be something that has a formula. Even in the age of  creative technologists, with the added importance of understanding technology, our job is to get something done. It can be extraordinary and the result of experimentations but it it still about getting it done. Not the pursuit. Which puts us closer to chefs, artists, et al, than scientists.

All quotes taken from "Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food."