Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 56

3 SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ARTS LIFE EDMONTON JOURNAL edmontonjournal.com A slow cooker of a movie for foodies to savour 1 Film shows how El Bulli came to be known as worlds best restaurant MOVIE REVIEW El Bulli: Cooking in Progress Director: Gereon Wetzel Starring: Ferran Adria Classification: PG (In Spanish with English subtitles) Theatre: Metro Cinema at the Garneau: Tuesday and Thursday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 2:45 and 9 p.m., Sunday at 12:45 and 7 p.m.; Monday at 9 p.m., Wednesday at 7 and 9 p.m. JAY STONE Postmedia News ill rrr ill i iKww-'r org i 5 1 1 A. X. if "A T-? p. that isn't good." As the chefs foam, pound, sugar, vacuumize, fry and juice various concoctions, he explains he's looking for something completely different' for the menu.

The secret ingredient, he says, is magic. He wants to "open- a new path" for the customers. r'' After the endless preliminaries 1 although the foodie community may 2 be spellbound we return to the restaurant itself. It's an avant-garde Li-place that required a reservation, 1 even if there was a table 'J to avoid setting a precedent. El Bulli "3 served 8,000 diners each season, but got two million requests a year.

As opening day nears, its 40 chefs orchestrate a mad rush of table-, setting, deaning, and explanation of the various dishes, while trying out new ones on the boss. Tangerine in olive oil and ice brings a smile, as the i subordinates look on anxiously. Ice? In 2008-09, when the film was shot, El Bulli was featuring water in all its forms. Things are frozen, served under a layer of ice, or mixed with water. "What do they serve at El Bulli?" Adria imagines people asking.

"Water," he imagines them replying. I Cooking in Progress ends with an i almostpornographicphotomontage of the El Bulli menu, a rich record, i of gorgeous-looking dishes. What" we don't see is any customers eat- ing anything. But this isn't a about eating. It's a story about the 1 food.

SUPPLIED: KINOSMITH From left, Eduard Xatruch, Oriol Castro and Ferran Adria combine cuisine with science for the now-closed El Bulli. El Bulli was a famous Spanish restaurant that was often named the best in the world. It specialized in molecular gastronomy, a combination of cuisine and science: In addition to pots and pans, its kitchen contained tanks of liquid nitrogen and a "vacuumizer" that could seal bits of sweet potato and pumpkin oil, for example, if you wanted that done. Dinner at El Bulli consumed three hours and comprised some 35 dishes, including everything from such creative surprises as "ice vinaigrette with tangerine and green olive" and "vanishing ravioli" to such relatively prosaic titles as "rabbit brain in its ragout." Every year, El Bulli would shut its Catalonia location for six months so "Warm up part of it. Let's see what happens," someone says during the course of 1 Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a documentary about a year in the life of the restaurant.

The result isn't that good, but food science marches on. German director Gereon Wetzel was essentially a fly on the wall not that the now-closed El Bulli would allow such an infestation during the months of experimentation, and then back at the picturesque cove in Catalonia, where El that chef Ferran Adria a demanding micromanager whose instructions were often along the lines of 'less Parmesan, more coffee" and his team of sous chefs could go to a lab in Barcelona and work on new dishes. The lab, all stainless-steel cooking surfaces and computers, was a spotless hothouse of ideas, where people were variously chopping, mixing, slivering and making ravioli out of an alarming array of vegetables and meats. It was all about the experiment. Bulli annually opened for business in mid-June.

This is cinema verite at its purest (or is that most pureed?) There is a bare introduction of the characters, no explanation of what is going on, no elucidation of the philosophy of cooking beyond what Adria mentions in passing. Actually, he mentions a lot. The first half of the film, which unfolds with all the zip of a slow cooker, shows the staff trying out various ideas, while Adria shows up to say things like, "Don't give me anything "Wk I Ijftjpi1'! IVi One sequel spawns another for Booker winner 3 1 1,3 A tA Al MhM, i A A Reuters LONDON Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall retold the life and thoughts of Thomas Cromwell, is planning not one sequel, but two, she said in an interview published Friday. The 59-year-old revealed she was planning a followup to Wolf Hall after she won the coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2009. That book, she said at the time, would be called The Mirror and the Light and would follow Cromwell on his rise to the peak of power in Tudor England and end with his execution.

Now The Mirror and the Light will become the third book in a planned trilogy, and a new work, Bring Up the Bodies, will be published in between, Mantel told the Guardian newspaper. "When I came to write about the destruction of Anne Boleyn the process of writing and the writing itself took on an alarming intensity, and by the time Anne was dead I felt I had passed through a moral ordeal," she said. "So I parted with my writing far earlier than I would usually, to ask my agent and publisher to read and judge if I had in fact finished a book. "They had the same reaction as I did, so it's decided that the second book will be Bring Up theBodies, and the third book remains as The Mirror and the Light." Bring Up the Bodies will be published by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, in May 2012. VA'- fc.

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