Dramatic elBulli Movie Coming Soon To Theater Near You

We should've seen this coming; elBulli, Ferran Adrià's legendary avant-garde haute cuisine restaurant that closed in 2011, will be portrayed in yet another film, this time in a "fictionalized dramatic feature film" titled EL BULLI. The movie will be based on Lisa Abend's book The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli.

Vendome Pictures has announced that it will produce and finance the film, and is currently looking for a director for the project. In The Sorcerer's Apprentices, Abend spends six months in 2009 at elBulli, capturing the drama of the kitchen's training program. The 32 apprentices, culled from 3,000 hopeful candidates, were "pushed to their competitive limits in a 14-hour-a-day Darwinian process," the press release brags.

Abend tells us that the crew will still be filming at the closed elBulli restaurant, but since characters (read: apprentices) are all international, parts of the film will be located in other countries. Production should begin in the fall of this year, she tells us via email.

"As for the adaptation, my book was more documentary than anything, and what it documented was often the very tedious nature of working in a fine-dining restaurant," Abend wrote. "Since the film is a feature and not a documentary, it will necessarily heighten the drama — and also condense a lot of the book. But some of the characters should be recognizable."

Obviously Adrià will be a key character in the movie, and the chef has been consulted in conversations about the movie. Casting decisions have not yet been made, a representative tells us, but we imagine Adrià will be too busy working on his epic food encyclopedia La Bullipedia to star in the movie. We nominate Javier Bardem to play the brilliant mad scientist/chef role. Judging from Bardem's performance in Skyfall, he can definitely pull it off.