I visited Mirazur for the first time in September 2017. The evening started with bread and a few lines from Pablo Neruda’s ode to bread, printed and placed on the table. It was not a decoration but a statement of intent: that food is never just food, that a meal is always also an argument about how to live. I have been following Mauro Colagreco for even longer, which is why the news of how Mirazur is marking its twentieth anniversary really got me curious.
Mauro Colagreco has, for this very special celebration, invited Ferran Adrià, but not to cook; he invited him to curate the twenty years of Mirazur’s creative development.
We all know that in the art world, a curator is not an artist. The role is something else entirely and in many ways something harder. A curator looks at a body of work, finds the threads running through it that even the artist may not have seen clearly, and constructs a framework that makes the whole thing legible in a new way. A great exhibition doesn’t simply show you what exists but also changes how you understand what you are looking at.
Applied to food, this is a genuinely new territory. Ferran Adrià spent a year inside twenty years of Mirazur’s creative output, examining, challenging and reorganising. The result is a menu that works like a retrospective, unfolding in thematic sequences, from garden to exhibition space to dining room to kitchen, each phase revealing a different dimension of Colagreco’s world. Flowers, Japan, the Mediterranean, citrus… What unfolds is not about the greatest hits of Mirazur but something far more complex and interesting: a rereading.
The dishes land somewhere between technique and poetry. Tiny peas are balanced on a sliver of vanilla bean and eaten like corn on the cob. A salad is served on top of a folded poem. Sea urchin is placed in a translucent wrapper. Cassis-dusted spaghetti surprisingly tastes of eucalyptus. Citrus granita is served in seashells. And yes, elBulli echoes surfacing throughout, inevitably and rightly. That restaurant changed the grammar of cooking for an entire generation, and its spirit is definitely acknowledged, but not as nostalgia; it is there as lineage.
Before the meal, guests pass through an exhibition documenting the R&D process behind the menu. Months of testing and discarding and starting again, made visible. Most restaurants want you to believe the food arrived effortlessly, while Mirazur clearly presents all the work that went into the development – and the work is the point here.
Ferran Adrià will not be present every day, but his influence runs through every course. In keeping with the spirit of the whole initiative, guests are invited to support the elBulli Foundation, his organisation dedicated to research and training for the next generation of chefs. This is a meal that gives something back as well. A gesture of kindness from Mirazur.
The anniversary menu runs from April 1st to May 17th, at €530 per person, with wine pairings from €350 to €950. It is, I am told, mostly sold out.
(All photos in the article are by Matteo Cerassale.)
