Saturday, Jan. 28 – El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
Like a lot of innovations, molecular gastronomy is easily parodied – and admittedly, the cuisine’s foams, airs and colloids, produced with chemicals and tools never seen in a home cook’s kitchen, can tip over into laughable rather than delicious when too much attention is paid to the technical side. (The cause isn’t helped by its mass-market mascot, the loathsome Marcel of Top Chef Season 2, who never met an ingredient he didn’t blast with liquid nitrogen.) But done right, the cognitive dissonance of these mad-scientist creations induce glee and delight. Saturday afternoon, Enzian screens Cooking in Progress, an inside look at the acknowledged master of the style, Ferran Adrià, whose restaurant El Bulli (since closed) was a holy pilgrimage for any foodie worth his or her gourmet artisanal finishing salt. Should the movie awake a desire to experience the trend directly, Sushi Pop in Oviedo serves a mean PB&J: grape-juice sorbet frozen tableside with nitrogen and topped with marshmallow foam and peanut butter powder. – Jessica Bryce Young
