Chef Ferran Adria says most of the food at the swank elBulli is simple.

THE world's most celebrated chef, Ferran Adria, is in Melbourne to launch a book and share kitchen tricks from his restaurant, elBulli in northern Spain, widely considered the best restaurant in the world.

On the weekend Adria, 46, held spellbound a sell-out audience of 1500 chefs and foodies at Hamer Hall, lecturing about his approach — part bowerbird, part boffin — and presenting videos of elBulli's methods and food.

Dishes included flexible meringues that look like timber, astonishing replica fruit, leaf-like crackers, and sponge cakes prepared with a soda siphon and cooked in the microwave.

Adria walked on stage with a baguette and explained that the science that goes into creating bread — or, indeed, making water boil — is as mind-bending as anything that springs from his kitchen.

"Much of my food is simple," he says. "But it's new and that's unsettling."

Even so, it's safe to assume no one in the audience went home to their pots and pans and attempted to replicate what they saw: you might as well listen to a doctor's lecture, then head off to perform heart surgery with scissors and sticky tape.

But many in the audience would have gone home and hit the internet, adding their missives to the 2 million or so bookings requests received annually by elBulli, all hoping to snare one of 8000 slots for a meal.

The feted restaurant inhabits a modest stone building by the sea at Cala Monjoi, in the rugged north of Spain, and is open for 160 days a year, from April to September. The rest of the year, the elBulli team is holed up developing the dishes that will be unleashed the following season. Diners at elBulli eat 30 or so small courses, paying about $400 a head.

Adria compares a booking at his restaurant to a hot ticket to see a pop star or a premier soccer team. But pop singers and athletes are easily digestible mass entertainment. The food at elBulli is determinedly avant-garde, developed in a laboratory before it hits the kitchens, and designed to prompt rhapsodic emotion as much as it is crafted to satisfy hunger.

"Cuisine is a language," Adria says. "We can make people think, feel, we can provoke them. All five senses are involved." He is inspired by travel (one dish was modelled on the landscape viewed from the plane between Adelaide and Melbourne), by art (as with a Gaudi-esque mosaic of mullet, zucchini and tomatoes) and by the natural world ("Thaw" replicates a snowy spring landscape with "frozen water dust" and fresh herb shoots).

Scientific discovery is the jumping-off point for some dishes.

When it was realised that mollusc cooking water has more flavour than the mollusc itself, the broth was built into a jellied sphere to encase the original morsel. It's complicated cookery, but the intention is pure: to add muscle to your mussel.

Some dishes are pure fun: caramel is formed into a spring shape around a spinning drill bit. The diner puts the coil on their finger, then into their mouth, where it dissolves. Some trajectories begin with disarmingly simple experiments: when thinly sliced mango was seen to resemble pasta, it led to a slew of new ravioli dishes.

Adria is driven by a desire to innovate, but he rails at the idea that his cuisine is a highbrow sneer at old-fashioned food. "I eat traditional cuisine every day," he says.

Creating an elite dining experience doesn't mean the elBulli crew is a breed apart. "What we do is special, but we are very normal people."

Indeed, staff meals at elBulli include comforting staples such as macaroni carbonara and roast beef. There is no argument between haute and traditional cuisine, he says.

"It's like asking whether people prefer the Beatles or jazz music. It's a stupid question: 1000 to one the Beatles will win. But the people who love jazz love it in a very particular way."

Most of those who want to come to elBulli to eat jazz will never get the "reservation accepted" email, but Adria believes all diners reap the fruits of that lab-coat labour.

"An avant-garde movement makes things more dynamic," he says. Right now that means foams appearing on risottos all over Melbourne — "fantastico", he says — but the influence goes further. "It could be a Chinese restaurant paying more attention to their wine list, or a great chef improving the food in a hotel. The most important thing is that we don't go into a gastronomic recession."

He relates his food to haute couture.

"How many people actually wear the dresses you see on the catwalks? None. But the commercial brands take the details out into the wider world."

Even those who do make it to elBulli will rarely understand exactly what it is they're eating.

But that's OK with Adria. If they get a good feeling, he feels he has done his job.

"The most important thing is that this dining experience, this four hours, should be a happy and joyful event," he says.

"It's not easy to create things that will bring pleasure. But if we can do that, then, yes, it's enough."

A Day at elBulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adria is published by Phaidon ($75).