The restaurant closed, but its creative mythology keeps expanding.
San Sebastián
The story of elBulli, the restaurant that transformed contemporary gastronomy under Ferran Adrià, is moving into scripted television with Gènesi, a six episode series presented at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. The production follows Adrià’s path from his arrival at elBulli in 1983 to the period in which the restaurant became a global reference point for culinary innovation. Fictional characters are incorporated into the narrative, but the kitchen, dishes and creative processes were reconstructed under Adrià’s close supervision. The objective is not simply to dramatize a famous restaurant, but to recreate the environment in which a new gastronomic language emerged.
Adrià insisted that the food shown on screen had to remain faithful to what elBulli actually served. Real tasting menus were reconstructed, and the chef participated in the project precisely because he wanted to avoid the artificial kitchen scenes common in film and television. Miquel Fernández plays Adrià, supported by extensive audiovisual archives that documented the chef across different stages of his career. That material allowed the production to reproduce not only his appearance, but also the changing rhythm, intensity and manner of his communication.
The project also carries a broader cultural ambition. Gènesi emerged from an initiative linked to the Catalan government and TV3 that sought to project Catalonia’s gastronomic legacy internationally. Adrià has argued that the transformation generated by elBulli was never fully explained through audiovisual storytelling, despite the restaurant’s influence on techniques, menus and creative processes far beyond Spain. The series therefore positions gastronomy as cultural history rather than mere entertainment.
elBulli closed as a restaurant in 2011 while still holding three Michelin stars, but its institutional afterlife has continued through the elBulli Foundation and the museum that opened in 2023. Adrià has made clear that he feels pride rather than nostalgia for that period and has no intention of returning to conventional restaurant work. The series reinforces that transition from restaurant to archive, laboratory and cultural reference point.
Gènesi will later reach Netflix after its initial presentation and regional release, extending the story of elBulli to audiences that may know the name without understanding the scale of the revolution behind it. The more interesting question is not whether the series can recreate a legendary restaurant. It is whether television can capture the intellectual process that made a kitchen become a movement.
La narrativa también es poder. / Narrative is power too.