Our New View film season kicks off with a study of the brilliant chef Ferran Adrià and his groundbreaking restaurant El Bulli. Available in the UK and Ireland only
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
Welcome to day one of the New View film season: a five-part celebration of cutting-edge documentary-making that aims to cover all bases. We're kicking off with El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a profile of the legendary Spanish restaurant which rose to worldwide renown under chef Ferran Adrià. It pioneered the notion of "molecular gastronomy", won its third Michelin star in 1997, and closed in 2011.
Here's what what Observer film critic Philip French thought:
This film is a memorial to a peculiarly elitist culinary aesthetic where everything is new, original, cutting edge, following the master of "molecular gastronomy" on one of his last big years. The theme of the year is water in all its forms, starting with a water cocktail, and most of the delicate courses – often involving "vacuumising", "spherification" and "freeze-drying" – look more like exhibits in a natural history museum than in a restaurant. The film follows Adrià and his chief lieutenants in the laboratory and moves with them as they are joined by some 40-odd junior chefs (the vast majority male) at the restaurant, where the final rehearsals take place before the season starts.
Remember, we have a competition running to win a thousand free views of the New View season: click here to enter. And check back tomorrow for the second film, design doco Helvetica.