Introduction

Summary

Spain is a gastronomic powerhouse of the twenty-first century. Its contemporary cuisine is recommended in the finest restaurants, heralded by the most prestigious critics and demanded by millions of consumers the world over. Spain's relatively newfound position at the forefront of international gastronomy is due to the culinary genius of its avant-garde chefs – led by Ferrán Adrià – who have ‘taken haute cuisine beyond the merely contemporary into a whole new realm’ (Andrews 33). Working with such techniques as caramelization, liquefaction, emulsification, ultra-low-temperature freezing and the production of food-based ‘foams’ and ‘airs’, Adrià and his followers have spearheaded a movement in culinary deconstruction, which ‘involves the breaking down of familiar dishes into their constituent parts, changing the physical identity of at least some of those parts and then reassembling the pieces in new ways, so that the dishes take on different forms’ (Andrews 39). This process has resulted in the creation of iconic avant-garde dishes such as ‘The Sea’, ‘Spherical Caviar of Melon’, ‘Tortilla de Patatas Foam’, ‘Beetroot and Yoghurt Meringues’ and ‘Red Mullet Gaudi’, which have extended popular conceptualizations of both food and the dining experience.

Spain has received international acclaim as a serious food destination, and this has been influenced by the cuisine of Adrià and other innovative chefs. The interest in such cuisine has also resulted in widespread appreciation of traditional, regional Spanish cooking, as well as in appreciation of the country's great wealth of raw materials and food products.