How do you feel about sharing your home with a stranger? To some people this is an odd, if not downright scary, idea. How can you know they are not an axe-wielding murderer? Of course you can never be one hundred percent sure, but I think it is fairly unlikely; when I was growing up, we always had lodgers from abroad in our house, and so far I have lived to tell the tale.
It is no coincidence that London’s Somerset House should have chosen the figure of Ferran Adrià to define “The Art of Food”. But we do have to ask ourselves who really chose whom. Two years after closing elBulli, Adrià – our world famous icon of gastronomy – is still an international benchmark of culinary creativity and research, whilst Somerset house, with its spectacular neo-classical building in the heart of London has attracted over 2.5 million visitors every year since its opening in 2000. It’s a perfect partnership which is joined by Estrella Damm and the Instituto Ramón Llull, an organisation internationally recognised for promoting Catalan language and culture.