The Estrella Damm Chefs' Choice Award 2025 winner on pushing the limits of innovation and stepping out of his brother's shadow.
Chef, pastry chef, brother of industry legend Ferran Adrià, genius: over the years, the press has imposed many labels on Albert Adrià. Ask Adrià to define himself, however, and the answer is more simple, yet elusive: "In the most basic terms, I'd describe myself as a person who tries to use logic and apply it to his job. These days, I talk a lot about cooking, logic, and the logic of cooking."
If this commitment to logic sounds like a rather dull approach, be assured that Adrià's boundary-pushing career has been anything but. He spent 23 years at El Bulli, the five-time winner of The World's Best Restaurant Award and member of the Best of the Best hall of fame. This was a period marked by innovation both on the plate and in working practices. Now, he delights diners at Enigma, his fantastically designed Barcelona restaurant grounded by his commitment to quality produce handled with a delicate yet creative touch.
Back to the beginning
Adrià was just 16 years old when he joined his brother Ferran at El Bulli. With the benefit of hindsight, it's tempting to read this move as a sign of a young chef's ambition. But the story is not quite so neat. "It wasn't the kitchen that interested me, it was the setting and the chance to live by the sea," he says. "In my mind, the price of living there was having to work in the kitchen. I didn't really care whether I was a chef or a gardener."
El Bulli was located in Catalonia's Cap de Creus Natural Park
Horticulture's loss was gastronomy's gain. After starting as a cook, he quickly shifted into pastry, a move that continues to impact his work to this day. "As a chef, you tend to start with an ingredient that shapes how you're going to conceptualise the dish and often these ingredients end up destroyed if you manipulate them too much," Adrià explains, giving prawns, tomatoes and steak as examples.
"As a pastry chef, you're starting from zero every time and playing with a 360-degree conceptualisation of the plate. I continue to use that perspective to this day."
It's no overstatement to say this perspective changed modern gastronomy. El Bulli was the first restaurant in the world to have a dedicated research and development space, El Taller, and Albert was at its centre. From here, techniques such as spherification and foaming emerged and gained El Bulli international acclaim.
A silent revolutionary
As the restaurant's head chef, it was Ferran who became the face of the restaurant, with Albert Adrià regarded more as a sidekick than a creative force.
"That's how I wanted to be seen," he says when asked what it was like to be known in the press as 'the brother of Ferran Adrià'. "My brother paid me to be creative in the workshop and I didn't have time to speak to the press. I wanted to fly under the radar and spend all my time creating.
"The work I did at El Bulli required a high level of concentration 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year, because ideas flow and emerge when and where you least expect them. The less I spoke about my work, the better. Even now, I prefer to speak about my work through the food itself rather than with words."
In 2015, Adrià won The World's Best Pastry Chef Award and in 2019, Tickets reached its highest position on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, coming in at No. 20
Since El Bulli's closure in 2011, Albert has opened a number of restaurants, including Tickets (which shut in 2020) and Enigma (No. 34 on The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025 list), both in Barcelona. Despite proving himself independently many times over, his fame and recognition remains dwarfed by that of his brother. Among chefs, however, his true impact is better understood, as his Estrella Damm Chefs' Choice Award 2025 proves.
"The award is a great personal recognition," he says. "I spent so many years hearing that I was just Ferran's brother or just the El Bulli pastry chef. Journalists would even ask me if I thought I was the most undervalued chef in the world," he says, smiling. "The win is emotional for me. It makes me want to keep improving and keep offering more."
The secret to creativity
This desire to keep pushing is manifest at Enigma, which Adrià describes as the least El Bulli-like of all the restaurants opened by former El Bulli chefs. "I try not to look back. If you come to Enigma, you'll see we're not using many of the techniques we used at El Bulli."
What you will find is an experience engineered to delight, from the secret code required to gain entry and the dream-like dining room (designed by celebrated firm RCR Arquitectes) to the dishes themselves, which include the likes of pig's ear in jamón broth and lime mille-feuille with wasabi ice cream and black sesame.
The surreal surroundings of Enigma set the stage for a remarkable dining experience
If there's one thing Adrià credits for his creative tenacity, it's his willingness to fail. "You have to learn how to live with failure and understand that it's part of success. You have to get a lot of things wrong to understand exactly what's not working and find the right path. I'm willing to live with mistakes."
Among his peers, he's seen a shift away from this rigorous commitment to creativity. "The reality is that these days creativity has lost its value. Restaurants that are truly committed to avant-garde cuisine don't win awards. Genuinely avant-garde restaurants break new ground; that's why El Bulli and other restaurants from that time are so important.
"Nowadays, lots of restaurants have creative workshops, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're being truly creative. It's not an easy thing to do because there's no limit – you do one thing, then it's onto the next. It can be very draining."
Adrià cites Andoni Luis Aduriz (chef-owner of Mugaritz) and René Redzepi (co-owner and chef at Noma, the only restaurant besides El Bulli to be named The World's Best Restaurant five times) as exceptions to this trend. "I think they're good examples to follow," he says. "They've always remained true to their philosophies."
The next chapter
Alongside his work at Enigma, Adrià is involved in other projects and collaborations, including food hall Mercado Little Spain in New York (in collaboration with brother Ferran and fellow Spanish chef José Andrés) and dessert emporium Cakes & Bubbles in London.
He's also developing ice creams with his project Gelato Collection, venturing into vegan cheeses with Julienne Bruno and reinventing pasta with Atavi, using processes such as nixtamalisation and koji fermentation to create greater depth of flavour.
At Enigma, Adrià is enjoying "a period of total creative freedom"
Working with brands, he says, is a learning experience he greatly enjoys. "It puts you in a reality that's completely different to our own. Their world is all about competing with other brands and the fight for market position. In contrast, ours is a kind of utopia. You learn a lot from these interactions."
There are more projects in the works – Adrià is tight-lipped but reveals he's working on teas and more ice cream – but the goal now is to set himself up for a simpler life.
"I want to go flat out for the next five years. After that, you'll just find me walking my dog."
Discover 12 iconic dishes from El Bulli.
