New 'El Bulli' movie in the works

Another movie studio is set to immortalize Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s shuttered restaurant El Bulli, this time based on the eatery’s final year and the interpersonal dramas that played out between chefs.

Based on Lisa Abend’s book "The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli," the film will ‘mix’ fact and fiction, says Vendome Pictures, which will be producing the movie.

For her book, food journalist Abend was given behind-the-scenes access to the El Bulli kitchen in 2009, where she was privy to the rigorous training program and the inevitable human dramas that unfolded among the kitchen’s brigade of young, ambitious chefs.

Every year, out of 3,000 applicants, only 32 were chosen to apprentice in Adrià’s kitchen, where they would work 14-hour days in a triple Michelin-starred restaurant 160 km north of Barcelona, also named the best restaurant in the world five times by Restaurant magazine.

Adrià shuttered the restaurant in 2011 at the height of its popularity, when the eatery was the foodie’s ultimate pilgrimage site, drawing two million reservation requests annually for 8,000 seatings.

Written by screenwriter David Wilson, the film is expected to begin production this year.

Meanwhile, in 2011, German filmmaker Gereon Wetzel also released a documentary on the restaurant entitled "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress," which captured the kitchen as chefs boiled, roasted, fried, steamed, spherified and vacuum-packed foods in culinary alchemy.

In 2014, El Bulli will reopen as The El Bulli Foundation, touted as a culinary research and development center.