How Disfrutar Innovated To Become The World's Best Restaurant
Disfrutar awarded World's Best Restaurant in 2024, and their fried eggs with flavored, colored ... More centers
Disfrutar, the restaurant from the partner team of Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch, and Mateu Casañas, for the past year has reigned as the 'The Number One Restaurant in The World'. The award bestowed by 'The World's Best Restaurants' is chosen by 1,100 restaurant experts from around the world. That recognition was achieved that through hard work, tremendous creativity, iteration, challenging conventional notions about the entire restaurant experience, and constant questioning by every employee. The trio worked together for over 15 years at El Bulli, 5-time winner of the World's Best Restaurant Award, located near Roses on Catalonia magnificent Costa Brava. Disfrutar is a model of innovation for any business in any sector. The constant quest to be in the vanguard is a self-imposed pressure that ensures constant innovation and the search for new culinary concepts. I wrote about Disfrutar in Forbes in 2017, and it's been fascinating to follow how it rose to number 1 globally.
Logos of Disfrutar and Compartir restaurants in Barcelona
The trio's first restaurant, Compartir, which means to share, opened in Cadaques on the Costa Brava in 2012. The idea was to serve sharable plates of regional dishes prepared with modern techniques. Disfrutar opened in Barcelona in December 2014, extending the groundbreaking creativity and innovation of Ferran Adrià and El Bulli. Disfrutar's goal was first and foremost, to create a dining experience guests would enjoy, hence the name, which means to enjoy in Spanish.
For the past 17 years, since reading the Harvard Business School Case El Bulli: A Taste of Innovation when it was written in 2008, and teaching it in MBA and Executive MBA programs ever since, I've been struck by how much businesses of all types can learn. What follows are Disfrutar's inspiring and instructive examples.
The special "living table" at Disfrutar designed by Merche Alcalá.
The Entire Organization Is Empowered To Innovate
Beyond the exceptional food and artistic presentations Disfrutar and Compartir are known for, every detail of the experience has created opportunities to excel. Each department (cook, service, wait staff, creativity, design, media & comms, human resources, admin, consulting, student collaborators, and its design agencies) are empowered to constantly innovate. A prime example is the special 'Living Table' - a dining table conceived by the design studio Merche Alcalá with 40 compartments that open from the top, to reveal beautiful plant arrangements and dishes.
Chart with all the elements that go into an exceptional meal
The diagram above, titled 'What's Behind the Menu', was created with input from Disfrutar team members and loyal customers and is a visual reminder of all the elements that go into creating an entire restaurant experience. It can be adopted and adapted by innovation teams in different industries. The graphic encourages teams to think more broadly about all the ways they can both innovate and that their products are perceived by end users. For Disfrutar, the elements include technique, creativity, emotions, memories, flavors, sensations, stimulation, knowledge, fun, and much more.
Disfrutar's mission to constantly develop major new food, presentation, and experience concepts, requires an organizational mindset to always be on the hunt, and to look outside the food sector and Spain for unconventional ideas. Disfrutar collaborates with students from Barcelona's Massana and EINA Schools of Design, many of whom study jewelry design, for unique presentation vessels, cutlery, and serving utensils. Aside from the land and sea throughout Catalonia which are huge sources of inspiration, Oriol, Eduard and Mateu travel to countries including Japan, Greece, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, and Singapore to discover new ingredients, cooking techniques and equipment that have been used in a kitchen before in Spain. Once a month, the chef Oscar Albiñana shares new products he's found throughout the food industry.
The Korean OCOO pressure double boiler being used to transform cauliflower in color and flavor
Equipment traditionally used for one purpose can be applied to create new dishes like Disfrutar's Black Cauliflower that uses an OCOO pressure double boiler using the setting for 'aged eggs' (aka thousand-year-old eggs or century eggs). After many hours, the cauliflower develops balsamic flavor notes and a soft texture, yet maintains its original shape. The team iterated varying the number of hours the cauliflower cooked until the desired taste and appearance were achieved.
Fried eggs with basil, tomato and squid ink flavored centers
Always Asking Questions And Challenging The Status Quo
The Disfrutar team constantly asks how things can be done differently. Ingredients are subjected to different cooking processes, and familiar processes are applied to atypical ingredients. Questions are asked like:
- Why must an egg yolk only be yellow and contain only yolk?
- Why can't a yolk be combined with other ingredients like pesto, tomato or squid ink and be red, green, or black?
- Can a different round ingredient be fried on top of an egg white, besides a yolk?
- How can a piece of equipment used for one preparation, be used to transform another ingredient?
- Why must butter always be smooth, yellow, and solid? Why can't it be full of aerated bubbles that when cold, melt before your eyes at room temperature?
- Why must cooked leeks be soft? Why can't they be stiff batons, that are crunchy
and brittle and used for dipping?
Different Types of Innovation
Ten years ago I was inspired by the way the El Bulli team innovated to write my book, Catalyzing Innovation, that identifies 64 different ways companies can innovate strategically, with 1,100 cross-sector, global examples. Many of what I identified in the book as 'innovation lines of thinking' are used by the Disfrutar team.
Fried donut filled with caviar and sour cream
Both Disfrutar and Compartir serve a remarkable warm donut filled with cold caviar and sour cream. It's both indulgent, delicious, comforting, and familiar, and every bite is savored.
Metallic looking egg yolks made with edible gold, silver and copper
Disfrutar makes what look like egg yolks, and colors them with edible gold, silver, dark silver, and copper to create shiny, metallic looking orbs that ooze like a runny egg yolk when cut with a fork.
Spheres of corn flavored purée encapsulated and fused to look like corn on the cob
Analogizing is a favorite line of thinking for the Disfrutar team, like the example above that looks like corn on the cob. One of El Bulli's most famous food concepts was spherical olives. A sodium alginate membrane encapsulated an intense green olive purée that burst in your mouth with flavor. Disfrutar evolved the technique to create 'multi-spherification'. In this dish, individual small orbs with intensely flavored corn purée inside are placed in small molds where they adhere to each other like corn kernels on a cob.
Freeze dried calçot, like leeks, that are transformed from soft to brittle sticks for dipping
Braised leek-like calçot, a winter time favorite in Catalonia, are turned into crispy batons through freeze-drying. They're dipped in a unique variation of Catalonia's iconic romesco sauce. The calçot are 'plated' on newspaper, which is how they're typically served in the country-side during harvest season.
Flavored, colored butter-like spreads with an aerated texture
In place of typical, smooth butter to spread on bread, Disfrutar creates flavored, aerated, cylindrical shaped fats ranging from pistachio oil, to cocoa butter, and Iberico Ham fat that melt before your eyes at room temperature. It plays with texture, taste, mouthfeel, aroma, appearance, and emotions associated with butter.
"Spherified" pea necklace surrounding squid
Constant Iteration On Concepts And Scaling Them
Once a major new concept is developed, like 'spherification', it can be applied in a number of different ways (similar to the way Apple might apply their iOS operating system to different device types). The 'spherification' concept has been applied to pea-size colored spheres, miniature caviar-like pearls, ravioli size, and egg yolk sizes as previously mentioned.
Key Learnings
There is so much to learn from Disfrutar. In some ways, it's easier to innovate with food compared to other industries because the costs and capital investment are not as prohibitive, and experimentation can be faster and more varied. Based on studying Oriol, Eduard and Mateu's methods, my advice to companies in virtually every sector, from automotive, to fashion, hotels, consumer package goods, and financial services is to:
- Look to other sectors and countries beyond the obvious, to benchmark how analagous problems are dealt with
- Empower the entire organization with a mindset of constant questioning and reinvention
- Push your organization to explore different innovation lines of thinking vs. the usual, like making experiences more multi-sensory, varying materials, colors, shapes, product forms, distribution methods, presentation and merchandising, and business models
- Give significant thought from the beginning of product development to how the innovations can be scaled and extended
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