Ferran Adria

Ferran Adrià sets out his stall

The elBulli star plans to open a market in his home town, dedicated to Catalan produce

We thought that the godfather of deconstructivist cuisine had been concentrating on more exotic ventures, given the news last year that his new restaurant would be a Brazilian-Japanese fusion place, with a heavy emphasis on vegetables. However, Catalonia's leading newspaper,  La Vanguardia, reports that Ell Bulli's Ferran Adrià plans to co-found a produce market in his home town of L'Hospital de Llobregat, the region's second-largest city, to promote local ingredients.

The mayor, Núria Marí, trumpeted the news, telling the paper that the 15,100 square-metre market, to be set up in an turn-of-the-century textile factory in the Granvia district, will “become one of the reference points for Catalan gastronomy.”
While details are thin, Ferran's market should both serve as a tourist attraction for the town - sometimes rather disparagingly described as a suburb of Barcelona - as well as a source of gastronomic training and employment for the region.

We applaud Adrià involvement in the scheme, and will certainly head there for our calçot onions and chorizo, if not those more hard-to-find elBulli items, such as nitrous oxide cannisters or a candy-floss machine. To read more (in Spanish) about the announcement, view the Vanguardia piece here, and for more  Adrià insights, take a look at our indispensable tome A Day at El Bulli.