Lessons in Business Innovation from Legendary Restaurant elBulli

Ferran Adrià, chef at legendary Barcelona-based restaurant elBulli, was facing two related decisions. First, he and his team must continue to develop new and different dishes for elBulli to guarantee a continuous stream of innovation, the cornerstone of the restaurant’s success. But they also need to focus on growing the restaurant’s business.

MIKE NORTON: We have this funny thing that we do with food and drink, which is we don’t just eat it and drink it. We do all kinds of things with food and drink. Even like we are going to have a drink with friends and before we have the drink, we raise our glasses up in the air, clink them together with risk spilling it, and stuff like that. Then we say in almost every culture in the world, a one or two-word phrase that means health or luck or good, something like that.

BRIAN KENNY: Let’s talk about elBulli. What are its origins? The case describes this. I thought it was fascinating. BRIAN KENNY: Your anticipation level is already through the roof before you even start the journey to get to the mountain top. Then they’ve created… They’re building the experience up for you as you get there. The kitchen staffed by 30 people, there’s only 80 patrons. So, you’ve almost got a one-to-one ratio for staff to patrons. What happens after that?

MIKE NORTON: That’s right. He got very famous for making foam out of all things like carrot foam, essence of carrot in a foam. You just eat, it disappear on your tongue. People would go and say, “Give me the foam. I want the foam. That’s the greatest hit.” He said, “There’s no foam. No foam. No more foam here. Sorry. You can’t have any foam.”MIKE NORTON: Exactly. He literally just would cut it no matter what, and try something new.

MIKE NORTON: One thing they do is, unlike many other food services is they closed for half the year, every year, which partly relates to why they weren’t making a lot of money. Because it’s hard to only be open half the year. They were basically saying, “We’re going to close entirely and start from scratch.” They would just go around the world and try to find things. Literally, there’s a great video where… I forget which vegetable they find.

BRIAN KENNY: For our listeners’ benefit, they may not have seen the classroom. We literally have, is it nine blackboards that are all movable, spread across the front of the room, and by the end of a class, those are typically filled with notes from the teacher. BRIAN KENNY: Do rituals make us perform better? I mean, if you have a ritual that you do, does it enhance the way that you approach something?

MIKE NORTON: Completely. I actually realized studying rituals is one of these things where I started doing it at a remove, like I’m a scientist and I’ll study the humans. Then I realized I’m doing them all the time. I have a teaching ritual, which is I always write… My teaching plan is exactly what we’re going to do in class. Always write it on yellow-lined paper, yellow. If it’s on white, I can do it, but I don’t like it.

MIKE NORTON: Yes. Our daughter is eight years old, and so that’s prime Disney age. So if you have been to Disney or you’ve ever entered the park, extraordinarily-MIKE NORTON: People have very different feelings about Disney, et cetera, but just from a standpoint of bringing you into an experience and changing how you’re thinking and feeling, extraordinary how they pull people in, and really for kids, it is actually feels magical to them.

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