Toque and Gown
Learning—After the esteemed lecturer Ferran Adrià lands a gig teaching a "gut course" at Harvard, the chef Ferran Adrià applauds a chorale of gastronomic high Cs composed by Clio's Ken Oringer. Jim Poris reports.
Jim Poris
Posted: May 5, 2009
Ferran Adrià arrived at Harvard University as a chef and left as a "professor." And, befitting his crowned head as the most luminous of culinary royalty, he dined very, very well.
From its beginnings in the primordial soup kitchen, the evolution of the chef profession attained the ultimate academic imprimatur of respectability with Adrià's appearance as a lecturer last December 9 at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). A spillover crowd jammed the lecture hall and the seats and floors of two satellite classrooms for a video feed to hear the husky-voiced Adrià narrate (with help of a translator) short films demonstrating the ingenious physical transformations of food that make his El Bulli in Roses, Spain, a culinary lightning rod and the most sought-after seat in the world. Following his appearance and two earlier classroom lectures, Adrià and SEAS forged a memorandum outlining a formal partnership to explore the two-way street of science and gastronomy. The collaboration has already borne fruit: for the fall 2010 semester SEAS is planning to offer an undergraduate course featuring lecture/demos by nine Adrià-picked chefs (plus one by himself), scientific explanations from SEAS professors, and hands-on student lab work to practically apply the science employed by the visiting chef.
"Cooking is a field in which you can be very creative, and Ferran is amazingly creative," says Otger Campàs, a Barcelona native with a doctorate in biophysics, who, as a SEAS researcher, spearheaded the initiative to bring Adrià to Harvard. "If you know the concepts of physics then you can be completely wild with ideas to create new textures and flavors and things that change when you put them in your mouth. We [SEAS] have the scientific background; as a chef, Ferran has the ideas."
Lest Adrià forever be assigned a lab coat, there's still the matter of food. Ken Oringer took care of that end, closing his restaurant Clio in the Eliot Hotel at 9 p.m. to set a table for Adrià; his wife, Isabel; Campàs; and a few others from the Harvard community. Starting around 10:30—early by Spanish standards—Oringer and his back and front teams began service of a 33 course intercontinental culinary tour de force that was two weeks in the making.
"When I heard Ferran wanted to come here, I knew what I wanted to do, which was to show him a wide variety of techniques as well as ingredient combinations that I'm almost certain he hadn't experienced," says Oringer, who, in 1997, was one of the first Americans to stage at El Bulli. "I wanted to showcase what we do, so it was hard to limit the menu. You know, at El Bulli you start off with like seven bar snacks, five tapas, a few New Wave cocktails. I was inspired to do the same thing, from soup to nuts."
A well-practiced chef-gatherer, Oringer took to phone and computer to order garfish, sea squirts, and more from Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market—"When he saw the whole garfish and the peel from the squirts, to see the whole animals, that made an impression"—barnacles from Chile, abalone and sea urchin from California, wood pigeon from Scotland, king crab from Alaska, plus an SUV full of other esoteric foodstuffs. He commandeered a workspace in the pastry kitchen for himself and chef de cuisine Andres Grundy, and they set to work, pasting cautionary skull-and-crossbones on their intricate mise en place before placing it in the pastry cold boxes.
Soon after "El Energizer," José Andrés, arrived a hour into the meal to recharge the party, Oringer sent out his white curry tripe, a dish that Andrés had already touted to his mentor, having told Adrià that "Kenny is a master with tripe." Oringer's tripe travels far from European norms: blanched in a broth boosted by galanga, lemongrass, ginger, black garlic, and black cardamom; cut into squares and simmered with the same aromatics in coconut puree, young coconut juice, fish sauce, pineapple juice, green mango, and smoked dried scallops; finished with a brunoise of pineapple, fried garlic, a chiffonade of kaffir lime leaf, and shaving of combava (dried kaffir lime).
As the dinner drew to a late, late conclusion after 2 a.m.—late even by Spanish standards—Oringer's crew, making like doctors delivering medicine to a patient, emerged from the kitchen with eye droppers filled with 142 proof Elixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse, which Oringer had secured in France, and tweezers to pick up the black-as-coal licorice flavored dehydrated sugar cubes, a sweet to cut the rare spirit.
"Ferran ate everything with gusto; I know, because I checked his plates as they came to the kitchen," Oringer beams. "It felt incredible, like I had just won the Super Bowl. It's nice to see something you planned work out just the way you wanted it to. And, because he has done so much for me, I'm glad I got the chance to extend my hospitality to him."
