El Bulli tribute dinners: culinary flattery – or theft? on Astini News
Tonight in his tiny, avant-garde Ottawa restaurant called Atelier, chef Marc Lepine plans to cook one of the strangest meals of his professional life.
The 15-course, $110-per-person dinner, which Mr. Lepine announced earlier this summer with a single message on Twitter, and which sold out just two days later, will include a composition called "carrot air" and a dish of liquid pea ravioli bound inside a polymer skin. And if the chef is able to source enough fresh rabbit heads, he'll also serve brains that are battered in pistachio powder and dehydrated yuzu peel and then lightly fried.
But that's not the strange part. What makes tonight's dinner stand out is that Mr. Lepine, who ordinarily is one of the country's most original chefs, will have stolen – or "borrowed" if you'd rather be diplomatic about it – every last one of the recipes from another chef. The event at Atelier will attempt to replicate the cooking of el Bulli, the groundbreaking modernist restaurant in Roses, Spain, that served its last meal this past July.
It's a "tribute dinner," a burgeoning restaurant-world micro-trend, and a term you're likely to hear much more of in the coming years as booming numbers of well-heeled, well-travelled diners compete for near-impossible reservations at the world's top restaurants.
Tomorrow night, René Rodriguez, the chef and owner of Ottawa's Navarra restaurant, will also cook an el Bulli tribute (he and Mr. Lepine are friends and plan to cook together for both events). In Chicago, Grant Achatz, a superstar chef who worked briefly at el Bulli before opening his own modernist temple called Alinea, has said he hopes to turn his second restaurant, Next, which changes theme, decor and menu every three months, into an el Bulli tribute for one of its incarnations. (Next's debut menu earlier this year was a tribute to Auguste Escoffier, the father of modern French cuisine.)
And in Stellenbosch, South Africa, chef Richard Carstens, of Tokara restaurant, held an el Bulli tribute dinner for 60 people the night the real el Bulli closed its doors. "The crowd gave us a standing ovation after the last course," Mr. Carstens said.
For food lovers who endured more than a decade of over-the-top critical raves about el Bulli but never had a chance to eat there, a tribute dinner is likely the only chance they'll ever have of tasting its food. Pej Vongpaisal, an Ottawa air traffic control engineer, spent four years trying unsuccessfully to score a reservation at el Bulli, he said. (The restaurant typically received two million requests annually for just 8,000 spots.) Mr. Vongpaisal has reserved not only for tonight's dinner, but for the one at Navarra, too.
But is faithfully copying another chef's work a tribute, or is it an extreme form of culinary theft? At least as long as there have been professional chefs, cooks have borrowed, copied and adapted each others' recipes. And for just as long, they've argued about where to draw the line.
Bryan Steele, the chef at the Old Prune, in Stratford, Ont., and a senior cooking instructor at the Stratford Chefs School, said that he draws his own inspiration mostly from shopping – he sees ingredients in the market, he said, and then he creates a dish. What he does not do, he said, is adapt or copy other chefs' recipes, unless he's personally worked with them first. "If I've staged with a chef for six months and I want to use one of his techniques, it's kind of mine," he said. "Otherwise, it's theft. It's stealing."
Yet many cooks – even the most creative ones – argue that cooking is a derivative craft in all but the rarest cases. When told of Mr. Steele's comments, Matt Kantor, a Toronto chef runs a pop-up dining business called Secret Pickle, laughed and said, "Does he ever make pie dough? …
