Who would dare to transform Barça’s Camp Nou into a theatre?

Chef Ferran Adrià has transformed the world’s best restaurant, El Bulli, into an innovation center that will open its doors in January 10 next year. ElBull1846 is Adrià’s most ambitious and secret idea, and comes to light after a €9 million investment. Adrià knows the project is radical, as most of his work. “It’s like transforming the Camp Nou into a theatre,” the chef told the Catalan News Agency.

“ElBulli1846 will be a lab to discuss the efficiency of innovation, and will focus on small and medium enterprises,” he added.  Visitors will need to book in advance to discover ElBulli1846, and only 500 people will be able to enter the center every day. The lab will use cuisine as a way to “question everything.”

El Bulli1846 is not a restaurant and people won’t be eating during their visit, warned Adrià. But food will be at the center of it and “there won’t be any rules,” the chef said, adding that the aim is for the project to evolve naturally with time. ElBulli1846 will keep the cuisine and the dining room of ElBulli as it was while the restaurant, the best in the world, was still open. Adrià wants it to become a “magic space” where every day will be different. “We don’t want this to be an exclusive project, but it must be intimate, private,” he explained.

ElBulli Museum

Ferran Adrià is also working on a museum about ElBulli in his local town, l’Hospitalet del Llobregat. “We are very excited,” he said. There is still no definite location for the museum, but the local council of l’Hospitalet has three possible options.

The museum will be as big as Barcelona’s MACBA and will include over 15,000 digitalized pages of the creativity notebooks of the famous restaurant. “ElBulli was a revolution, we changed the paradigm, thousands of people started to discuss what is food,” Ferran Adrià recalled.