So El Bulli, as we’ve all heard by now, will close.

But was it ever really open in the first place?

For too many people it wasn’t, because they couldn’t plan as far ahead as El Bulli has long required them to and make a reservation some 6 or 9 or even 12 months ahead, fixing a far-off vacation with that sort of exactitude, letting one restaurant and one meal stand as the tent pole around which a year’s worth of travel was organized. El Bulli has a limited number of seats; a table there is yours for the night; the restaurant shuts down for extended periods of the year. And yet tens of thousands of gourmands worldwide clamor to get in, because a visit there is synonymous in many circles with real gastronomic erudition. The arithmetic is brutal.

While this justly storied restaurant signaled the rise of Spain and the advance of what was sometimes referred to as sci-fi cuisine, it also reflected, better than any restaurant in the last decade, a sort of madness that came to infect the food world, a strain of merciless competition that split food lovers into two camps: those with the economic means and single-minded focus (or professional affiliation) to gain access to experiences as exclusive and rarefied as El Bulli, and those who had to listen to the rapturous accounts, nod appreciatively and cop to envy, which they were absolutely supposed to feel.

Continue reading . . .

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