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The Art of Food will include sketches and models of dishes served at Catalan restaurant before it closed in 2011
Ferran Adrià, one of the world's most highly regarded chefs who gave us food foaming, Parmesan ice cream sandwiches and the most difficult place on the planet to get a table reservation, is to get his own retrospective in London.
Somerset House announced on Thursday it was to host a major exhibition devoted to the superstar chef and his former restaurant on the Catalan coast, elBulli.
Called The Art of Food, the show will showcase "the art of cuisine and cuisine as art" and will include handwritten notes and sketches, plasticine models of the dishes that were served, photographs and archive footage.
Adrià closed elBulli in 2011 with the intention that it will reopen in 2015 as a foundation. He said of the London show: "Even though the restaurant of elBulli is now closed, the spirit of elBulli is still very much alive and this exhibition is one of the ways of keeping it so. For some, I hope it will revive good memories and for others it will give a flavour of a fine dining experience like no other."
For those who did get a table at elBulli, to sample just a few of the 1,846 dishes that were invented there, the experience was unforgettable. The Guardian's art critic Adrian Searle, describing his 40-course experience there in 2008, wrote: "The green leaf that tasted exactly of oysters; the grilled strawberry with ginger on the outside and an injection of gin on the inside; the polenta gnocchi with coffee and saffron yuba; the perfect razor clam with its gelatin twin in the other half of the opened shell. Playful, arresting, occasionally alarming, the meal is almost like a story."
• elBulli: Ferran Adrià and the Art of Food is at Somerset House from 5 July to 29 September.
