Do I want to dine at El Bulli … or stay home and watch MK on TV?

Having recently received an email from El Bulli and seen the name pop up several times recently, I am not inclined to wait until after I go there to write something about it. After all, a Google search for the name will point you to over 600,000 results; if only 1/4 of those are reviews, who needs another one?

I am a pig when it comes to eating (and maybe other things), and not exactly a novice when it comes to doing it in world-class restaurants, although it's been a while. The last time was in 1998, when I took my wife to Paris for 10 days as a birthday present. We had meals in two Michelin 3 star places in the Burgundy wine country:

• Bernard Loiseau's La Côte d'Or in Saulieu – big surprise: one of the items we were served in a 9-course lunch was a plate of wild mushrooms we couldn't eat because they were so gritty. The surprise was not the grit – that could happen anywhere; but, before the lunch, we had a Lillet with M. Loiseau and we talked cuisine for at least thirty minutes, yet nothing was done about the screw-up; no apology, no offer to replace, no adjustment of the bill, nothing. The server just took them away and brought the next course. Weird, no? (Loiseau killed himself in 2003).
• Marc Meneau's L'Esperance in St-Père-en-Vézelay – we were referred by my friend Alain Rondelli, who had previously been in charge of the kitchen there. No surprises here: the birthday dinner was fantastic, unbelievable, awesome! And the $800+ tab was a bargain – that included the Ports and the Cuban rum nightcap and cigar.

El Bulli is one I have not visited, it's just on the list, but not in first place. If you must know who has first place, Troisgros in Roanne, where Judy Rodgers of Zuni fame learned to cook. And the fact that I was part of the kitchen crew that served dinner to a group of 50 chef-members of the Chaîne de Rôtisseurs, among them the two Troisgros brothers may have something to do with this (that dinner took place during my stage at L'Auberge du Père Bise).

My nephew in Colombia, 32, has two little restaurants in Bogotá, cooking is what he lives for, and Ferran Adrià, chef owner of El Bulli is his idol. The kid spent about $500 (families of four live on that for a month in Colombia) on El Bulli books. When I was in Bogotá last year, he invited me to go shopping for ingredients to play with some of the recipes. And play with them we did – but the results were less that spectacular because we didn't know what the hell we were doing.

Now, this shopping, I like: smelling the porcini and chanterelles, touching the fruit and veggies at the SF Produce Market at 5 AM, grabbing the Maine lobsters from the tank at Royal Hawaiian, the Ahi tuna just picked up at the airport that morning, the fresh squab from Chinatown ... - fun things I often did, all the time drooling on the way back to cook them at Timo's, need I say more?

But shopping for El Bulli recipe ingredients was a drag. Here is the list, more or less:

• (we did not need to buy any food because it was all in the kitchen already)
• soluble powdered coconut
• bitter almond flavoring
• sodium citrate
• sodium alginate
• calcium chloride
• glucose
• citric acid
• 1 siphon
• 1 N20 nitrogen cartridge

This crap did not make me drool- it was more like gaaagh. I felt like I was on a tour of the CSI New York lab. Except the CSI lab does have something that makes me drool: Melina Kanakaredes.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Look at it.

My idea of a great kitchen is simple:

• heat – an oven (doesn't even have to be convection) and some burners, gas or wood/charcoal, not electric. A little heat is all I want to use for changing the molecular structure of what I put in my mouth.
• cold - one or two boxes to keep stuff there - preferably no longer than a few hours and certainly a day or two at the most - until it's time to hit it with the heat;
• a few gook knives with blades that don't stain, but that hold a very sharp edge;
• some heavy/thick pots and pans for good heat conduction – no aluminum because I don't like how it reacts to my tomatoes and egg yolks, no stainless steel because everything sticks, and no this-lined-with-that because they fall apart;
• a nice big coarse mortar and pestle – has anybody noticed that Zuni still makes the aioli in one of those things? – they actually use a Mexican molcajete;
• that's it.

I spent two weeks in Sitges (suburb of Barcelona) in September 2003, close to the end of the season for El Bulli. Believe it or not, the one night I could have gotten in, there was a Flamenco show somewhere, and I chose to go to that instead. Flamenco guitar and dance just sounded a lot better than ravioli sferico and foam that day. Come to think of it, I would just love to see MK on a tablao flamenco – she wouldn't even have to move.

Last year in Colombia, I heard a live radio interview with Ferran Adrià. Very interesting. When asked if he and his family normally eat a lot of his menu dishes, he said "no, all that stuff you hear is just marketing, we like our paella, fabada and callos". A modest man.

So, do I want to go to El Bulli? Damn right I do! But the anticipation is not that great – and I will probably wish I had done it before and more than once.