Ferran Adria to Reopen elBulli: To Train Actors + Maybe Here in Hollywood

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Ferran Adria

According to the AP, Ferran Adria's legendary -- and shuttered -- restaurant elBulli will be reopening, maybe as soon as next fall. But don't start stuffing your suitcases with Euros yet: Adria told the AP that he's not sure as to the location, or the time, or the duration -- although it seems to be for about a month -- or even who will get tickets reservations to the show. Because the restaurant isn't reopening exactly as a restaurant but as a rehearsal set on which to train the actors playing the chefs in an upcoming movie about Adria and elBulli.

It's also possible that Adria might not even reopen the real elBulli, now used as a school, but might choose to have the famed restaurant rebuilt elsewhere -- like, say, on a Hollywood studio lot. Awesome. Who needs to fly to Spain when we can drive over to Paramount or Sony to eat tapioca of Iberian ham or razor-clam sushi with ginger spray.

If this is starting to sound a little like the plot of Argo, well stranger things have happened. (How to get Spanish nationals out of Basque country? Make a movie!) Somebody call John Goodman, who'd get my vote for anybody's sous chef. Alan Arkin as sommelier? Why not. And Victor Garber would actually look pretty Adria-like in chef's whites.

So why open a restaurant simply to train actors to play chefs? Why rebuild said restaurant as a set in order to train those actors? Why not find actors who already work in restaurants (see: half the restaurants in L.A.) or maybe chefs who've already worked or staged in elBulli and live here and thus maybe secretly spend their nights off doing local theatre? Eh, maybe somebody should just call Ben Affleck's production company.

Adria told the AP that meals will be served to the public during the training sessions, whenever and wherever the restaurant opens. Vendome Pictures and Jeff Kleeman will produce the film, titled El Bulli, and David Wilson will write the "fictionalized account" of the chef and his restaurant, based on Lisa Abend's book The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adria's elBulli.

This is not the first film made about elBulli: in 2011 a German film entitled El Bulli: Cooking in Progress was released. No word on whether George Clooney got any of the credit.

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