El Bulli: Cooking in Progress El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
2011 Directed by Gereon Wetzel
Synopsis
For six months of the year, renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria closes his restaurant El Bulli -- repeatedly voted the world's best -- and works with his culinary team to prepare the menu for the next season. An elegant, detailed study of food as avant-garde art, EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS is a rare inside look at some of the world's most innovative and exciting cooking; as Adria himself puts it, "the more bewilderment, the better!"
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Utterly sublime to watch
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I know other people found this film too slow, or too low key, but I loved it. The insight into the painstaking way Adria and his team prepared for a season was amazing. I had no sense of the process involved, the rigorous experimentation, recording, and constant reinvention. I wish I could have eaten there.
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Mesmerizing, quiet and intense!
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This was such an infuriating film to watch. While it hints at revealing the creative process and production secrets from inside the kitchen of one of the world’s most famed restaurants, it steadfastly refuses to pull back the metaphorical curtain and spill the beans. Not that there isn’t a wealth of behind-the-scenes material: over half its two-hour duration is spent on the six-month preparation and experimentation period prior to the 2009 season opening, observing the layers of power within this tiny fiefdom (there were times, particularly in the midst of a technology failure early on, when I imagined this might have been what it was like to work in the shadow of Steve Jobs).
But perhaps that’s the lesson here.…
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Some films are hard to let you in. Some films do this with intention, and some do it out of necessity. El Bulli: Cooking In Progress falls in to the latter category. As documentaries go, it's a sparse one - this is a film that exists not to chronicle the culinary revolution that Ferran Adria fostered during his tenure at El Bulli, not does it exist to dissect his culinary legacy in the eyes of other gastronomical luminaries. Cooking In Progress is exactly that: the relentless documentation of a process, from conception, to refinement, and (hopefully) to perfection.
The film is fascinating as it begins, and we see Ferran's team begin to form the mold of the restaurant's upcoming season…
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El Bulli: Cooking In Progress is a German documentary about avant-garde Spanish restaurant El Bulli, which under head chef Ferran Adrià won three Michelin stars and was voted the best restaurant in the world five times. Director Gereon Wetzel followed Adrià and his staff for the best part of the year to track the development of that year's menu, first in Adrià's lab where his sous-chefs perform meticulously documented experiments with ingredients for six months, and then in the restaurant where the final menu is pulled together.
This being a European documentary, the craft of developing new dishes is treated with almost almost monastic seriousness; there's none of the playful banter that a British TV audience might expect from a…
Recent reviews
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This film is for all the die-hard foodies – a behind the scenes look at El Bulli, the restaurant owned by renowned chef and expert in molecular gastronomy, Ferran Adrià.
Dining at El Bulli is meant to be an experience of the senses; it’s too bad taste and smell can’t be conveyed through film. However, the colors of all the foods as they’re transformed into amazing dishes definitely come through. Adrià closes his restaurant for six months out of the year so that he and his staff can prepare a new set of dishes for the following season. During this time, his kitchen becomes a laboratory for discovering new textures, flavors, and visual presentations. The great strength of this film…
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Utterly mesmerising, such a compelling watch.
If you're a bit of a food geek then you'll love this.
For me, this is the perfect Monday night movie - quiet, subtle, and thought provoking.
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Mesmerizing, quiet and intense!
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Utterly sublime to watch
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While it was interesting I never really felt that it really drew you into the place or the people.
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Slow, ponderous and sparse on the details but that didn't stop me being enthralled.
Beautiful food I can only dream of getting to taste. Especially now that the restaurant has closed.There's a reason I'm 17 stone.
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I was surprised but this film captivated me and kept me "en haleine" and "en appétit" all the way through. It never shows how much it costs and we never see the clientèle enjoying it, but I can understand it was not the perspective the director had chosen for our eyes. If he had though, I might have given him a extra star or so...
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A fly-on-the-wall documentary about the chefs behind El Bulli, a restaurant overlooking a bay in Spain that is only open a few months of the year, and the process of creating the unique menu they serve.
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is a very minimal documentary that just puts you into the lab with the chefs as they come up with that year's courses, providing the viewer with an unbiased viewpoint to how creativity and cooking mesh. No interviews, no narration, just the process as it unfolds, El Bulli documents it's subject with the same avante-garde and minimal approach the food takes shape for their menu, which some viewers may find boring, but if you are along for the experience your mouth may start to water.
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This was such an infuriating film to watch. While it hints at revealing the creative process and production secrets from inside the kitchen of one of the world’s most famed restaurants, it steadfastly refuses to pull back the metaphorical curtain and spill the beans. Not that there isn’t a wealth of behind-the-scenes material: over half its two-hour duration is spent on the six-month preparation and experimentation period prior to the 2009 season opening, observing the layers of power within this tiny fiefdom (there were times, particularly in the midst of a technology failure early on, when I imagined this might have been what it was like to work in the shadow of Steve Jobs).
But perhaps that’s the lesson here.…