Restaurants & Tapas Bars

elBulli

Restaurant at the cutting edge of the Spanish culinary avant-garde, thanks to the work of the team led by Ferran Adrià and Juli Soler. Today it is considered a place of pilgrimage for all gastronomy enthusiasts. Its name comes from the term of endearment for the bulldog of the original owners, the Schilling couple. They came to Cala Montjoi in 1961, and in 1975 signed Jean Louis Neichel as their chef. A year later they received their first Michelin star, although Neichel started to play with the idea of creating his own business and to further his career in the city, in Barcelona. At the end of the 1970s he made up his mind, and in 1980 Juli Soler visited elBulli, and accepted the offer of the Schilling couple to manage the restaurant. It started badly: in 1981 it lost the star gained by Neichel. He continued to work alongside Jean Paul Vinay, and in 1982 regained the star. A year later, the second star was awarded. Ferran Adrià joined the team and elBulli now has three Michelin stars. The business receives 400,000 reservation requests a year, and can only make 8,000 settings a year in the season in which it opens, from June to December. The restaurant has been considered on various occasions the best restaurant in the world, according to a survey carried out by the Restaurant magazine in the United Kingdom.