Even while turning out 5000 macaroons for Valentine’s Day at Bottega Louie in downtown L.A., the pastry duo Carolyn Nugent and Alen Ramos are obsessing about their invitation to work for nothing in the kitchen of El Bulli for the year of its final countdown to closing forever. It would be a return stage in the seasonal kitchen of Spain’s sorcerer-chef Ferran Adria on the beach in Las Rosas for the team – partners in romance as well as in dough.
“We feel so honored and truly want to be part of the history and the evolution it has created in our time,” Nugent emailed, describing their search for a sponsor – print, television, restaurant -- “in exchange for our work on returning home.”
Earlier Adria has said he would close the restaurant at the end of this season for a two-year sabbatical. But now he’s decided it’s goodbye forever, according to the Times Diner’s Journal. Adria reveals that he and his partner have been losing half a million euros a year. He told the Wall Street Journal he’ll use that money to open an academy to advance his research into what he refuses to call molecular cooking.
The two cooks – she is American, he Venezuelan -- met at Joel Robuchon’s kitchen in Las Vegas and persuaded Chicago restaurant magnate Richard Melman of Lettuce Entertain You to subsidize a year of internships in Europe. They apprenticed at Pierre Hermé in Paris, Fat Duck in England, and El Bulli before working off their debt to Melman as pastry consultants and moving on to L.A.
I recognized their skill and the jewel-like signature of Hermé instantly at a Bottega brunch when the two of them arrived with platters of sweets – lush chocolate financières, exquisite macaroons in wildly garish colors, and an astonishing tart, chocolate ganache and salted caramel with a flutter of gold leaf and caramelized hazelnuts. I couldn’t believe it. In semi-gentrified downtown L.A. “And the pastry shell is just two millimeters thick,” Nugent pointed out. “Not four.”
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