Juli Soler, Ferran Adrià’s partner, quits managing elBulliFoundation for health reasons

Roses (ACN).- Juli Soler, who has been directing elBulli since 1981, has been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease by Barcelona’s Hospital de Sant Pau. On Friday, the family and the elBulliFoundation told the news to the press and asked them to respect the privacy of such circumstances. Soler, aged 63, has quit the management of elBulliFoundation to focus on treating the disease. However, he would still be “the permanent honourable president” of the foundation. Juli Soler has been Ferran Adrià’s business and culinary partner for the last three decades, and neither elBulli’s or Adrià’s success can be understood without him. Besides directing the restaurant and its successor project, in the early years Soler also ran the dining room. In fact, it was Soler who hired Adrià in 1984 and proposed him as elBulli’s chef – firstly together with Christian Lutaud and since 1987 as the restaurant’s only chef. Furthermore, in 1990, Adrià and Soler became co-owners of elBulli. That year they won their second Michelin star and since 1997 this Catalan restaurant had 3 Michelin stars until its closing in July last year. Ferran Adrià has been considered the best chef of the decade and has received a long list of awards throughout the world, including the Culinary Institute of America’s ‘Augie’ prize, considered the most prestigious in the world. The restaurant closed its doors in 2011 at its peak, in order to re-open in 2014 transformed into elBulliFoundation, a centre to experiment on the links between cuisine, art, design, technology and health.

For five years, El Bulli, located on the Costa Brava’s Cala Montjoi, in Roses, has been considered to be the best restaurant in the world by the magazine ‘Restaurant’. It has been the most influential restaurant in today’s cuisine, since most of the chefs running the best restaurants in the world have done a stage or worked at elBulli. From this culinary temple and lab, with Ferran Adrià in the kitchen and Juli Soler in the dinning room and offices, molecular cuisine was launched.