The Sorcerer's Apprentices
A Season at el Bulli
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
It was, arguably, the most famous restaurant in the world and perhaps one of the most significant and influential ever: the legendary 'el Bulli' in Catalonia, which closed in 2011, attained a near-mythic reputation for culinary wizardry. But what actually went on behind the scenes? What was the daily reality of life in the world's greatest kitchen?
The Sorcerer's Apprenticestells first-hand the story of a young chef enrolled in the restaurant's legendary training course. It shows her struggle to adapt, how she and the other apprentices learned to push themselves and the limits of their abilities, how they adjusted to a style of cooking that was creative in the extreme and how they dealt with the pressures of performing at the highest level night after night.
In past years stagiares have clashed with the severe demeanour of Oriol Castro, the restaurant's chef de cuisine; others have gone on to work at the restaurant. One was sent home each year, unable to fit into the high-wire act that is the el Bulli kitchen.
Complicating things even more, the stagiares lived together in shared apartments, so the events and emotions of their personal lives bled more than usual into the professional. The Sorcerer's Apprenticestells these smaller, more human stories as well.
At its heart, The Sorcerer's Apprenticesis a quest: it tells the tale of a handful of aspiring young people who submitted themselves to a grueling challenge in order to be made better by it. It also offers an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at the most famous restaurant in the world, through the lens of those who, ultimately, made it work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For years, chef Adri 's creative and enigmatic culinary genius at his restaurant el Bulli drew not only the attention of the world's top chefs and food critics but also of aspiring culinary artists looking to apprentice there. Food writer Colman Andrews has recently written a biography of Adri (Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food), and now New York Time's Spain correspondent Abend offers an intimate glimpse of life as a stagiaire a cook who agrees to work for almost nothing for a season as one of Adri 's apprentices. Weaving the history of the restaurant and Adri 's own story with the threads of the 35 stagiaires who apprenticed at el Bulli from June to December 2009, she captures the intense desire to learn and to please, the demanding pace of the work, and the anxiety over success and failure that drives these young chefs. Some of the stagiaires, unwilling to submit to the ego-crunching drudgery of the work, leave early in the season; others, worried constantly about living up to the demands of the position, settle into a rhythm that carries them through the mundane details of preparing meals and propels them to a new level of culinary skill and inventiveness. Abend's sometimes lively, often plodding narrative provides another dimension to the culinary legend that is el Bulli.
