Ferran Adrià receives his doctorate at the Oxford Literary Festival

LondonAll of this was supposed to be a conversation, but it ended up being a monologue. Geniuses have it made. They grab the ball, or the spoon, and don't let go. In this case, and as it has been done for many years, removed from the stove, What Ferran Adrià barely wanted to share was the microphone, which he practically denied to the companion in hardship who was supposed to talk with him, the theoretical physicist and expert in the history of cuisine, the Oxford doctoral student Javier Maurino-Alperovich.

The initial objective was clear: to talk about haute cuisine, what we eat and how we eat it. But Adrià went straight to the point and, although he referred to it, what he did was continue his evangelical mission to make the world understand that cuisine is or should be culture, art and love, and that it can also be a very profitable business, a first-rate economic driver and a symbol of a country's exports.

The magician of El Bulli –and now of the Bulli Foundation 1846– gave a master class this Friday in the ballroom of the Spanish Embassy in London, where colleagues established in the United Kingdom and food writers some of the most prestigious in the gastronomic landscape of the islands gathered to listen to him.

A word that was both understandable and rushed; convoluted and clear-sighted; and also often challenging, with some sentences that sought the audience's reaction: "The daily menu in Spain is being lost because it's an unviable business model"; "most people cook badly"; "my mother, the best cook in the world, would be the last straw... But when she cooked fried anchovies, she would make them half an hour early and serve them cold." And, as Adrià said, "it must always end with a controversial sentence." Maurino-Alperovich watched it all from the background and, like the nearly one hundred attendees, could only applaud at the end, surrendered to the evidence of the chef's overwhelming power.

Five PhDs without going to university

And this Saturday, Ferran Adrià – who has five doctorates honoris causa without ever having gone to university, and who, for all this, has been a reference at Harvard, for example - has finally been blessed and sanctified by another of the great universities of the world that had not yet recognized his genius, Oxford, where he has opened the prestigious literary festival, with a performance at the Sheldonian Theatre. Yes, a literary festival. The chef who was the driving force behind the haute cuisine revolution around the world in the first decade of this century, the man who says "without arrogance" that "those years, between 2006 and 2010, it was as if Nadal, Federer, Djokovic, and Sampras were all Spanish," in relation to Arzak, Berza, an innovator at the same time, has presented his current project as a researcher and educator.

On the one hand, discussing what they did at El Bulli; on the other, what they're doing with Bullipedia—the academic-level encyclopedia on the history of gastronomy—and what they're doing and what they're going to do with the Madrid Culinary Campus project, a university institute for the training of chefs, culinary innovation, and business management, created in collaboration with the Comillas Pontifical University, and in which Andoni Luis also participates. "A university within a museum," was how Adrià summarized it, which will have a physical location when the two buildings that are to form part of the macro-project surrounding the remodeled Chamartín station become a reality. A long-term project that is intended to be fully operational in about ten years.

The sustainability of companies and the need to continually innovate, to define a style, to understand what they did to "help others," were other comments that Adrià launched like a torrent, who also proved very pedagogical when defining gastronomy and classic haute cuisine - "it is not." "Gastronomy is pleasure. Michelin Guide recommends around 17,000 restaurants. Among the elite, with 3 stars, there are 150. Among the most important 50 Best there are around 180. Only 10 fight each year for innovation at the highest level. That doesn't mean they achieve it. This is haute cuisine."

And for those who can afford it, Adrià left a recommendation in London: A. Wong's Dim-Sum, on Wilton Road, near Victoria. Two Michelin stars. "I went and said: I want a party!" And I'm sure he got it.