This week at noon, at Tel Aviv's Messa restaurant, a square plate was served to a table, topped with a selection of whipped concoctions. Not the airy, refined, familiar kind, but something that resembles insulation solution in fierce colors: A red mound of tomato, one of baby onions, and in the center a bright green mound like an enormous toad. Please welcome: Molecular vegetable salad served with mini kebabs made of bread puree.

Two months ago, Aviv Moshe, the restaurant's chef, returned from a visit to El Bulli restaurant in Costa Brava, Spain, where he experienced the famous tasting menu of chef Ferran Adria: 32 dishes served over the course of four and a half hours for the price of 200 euros. When the meal ended, he says, he was so hungry that he devoured potato chips from the mini bar in his hotel room, which suddenly seemed like the most sane culinary option around.

Molecular cuisine, which chef Adria has been slaving over for approximately 15 years, is taking its first steps in restaurants in Israel. There are those who view this culinary outlook, about which dozens of books have been written, as another trend that is needlessly challenging eaters, while others embrace it as the future of cuisine.

	Advertisement

Israeli chefs, who visited El Bulli, ate at the restaurant and participated in chef Adria's workshop, have returned with vision and ingredients. This week Messa launched a tasting menu, consisting of seven courses which will be served to four diners in a feast that will be held just once a week, due to the extensive work and expensive ingredients required. At Kfar Sava's Barkarola restaurant, chefs Noam Dekers and Omer Zarnitzki also launched a molecular menu. And chef Amir Ilan, owner of Taco Bar and former chef at Dixie, is sweating over his kitchen stove to create molecular dishes, for now only for himself.

Intellectual exercise for the palate

What is molecular cuisine, why has it arrived here now, and will it sweep Israel like the relentless tortilla or the prime rib wrap? Probably not. Not only because of its high cost and the effort involved, but because of the complexity of the menu. According to Aviv Moshe, molecular dishes are always intriguing, but they tend to be an intellectual exercise for the palate, which appeals to only a small segment of the population. "The food is always interesting, but peculiarity often overshadows everything else," he explains.

The founding fathers of this cooking method, which in many ways resembles lab experiments involving test tubes, syringes and carbon, are the 46-year-old chef Adria and chef Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck restaurant in Maidenhead, not far from London. The Fat Duck and El Bulli were considered exceptional restaurants before their chefs dived into the world of molecular cuisine. In recent years, both have held first and second place, sometimes alternately, in rankings of the worlds' best restaurants, which are published in leading food magazines, including the prestigious New York Times list. Adria has been invited to present this cooking method and his dishes at the Documenta Exhibition in Kassel, Germany, which will open on the 16th of this month.

Molecular cuisine involves deconstructing and reassembling food in different textures, quizzical degrees of temperature and unconventional combinations. The familiar separation between sweet and savory doesn't exist, and neither does that of hot and cold, or main course and dessert. The dish is comprised of ingredients the chefs perceive as similar in their culinary composition. For example, salmon and pineapple, zucchini and chocolate, cauliflower and cocoa, and other combinations which diners have never been exposed to before.

El Bulli restaurant in Costa Brava is open only six months of the year, between spring and fall: Each season it can serve 8,000 visitors, and every year 350,000 people try to make a reservation. The waiting list is long, and there are those who climb up and down it according to luck, connections and plenty of determination. Chef Aviv Moshe came to El Bulli by coincidence: "A couple that dines at my restaurant reserved a place a long time in advance, and at the last minute one of them couldn't go. I jumped at the opportunity." Noam Dekers of Barkarola claims he "used connections with suppliers from Europe whom I work with" and returned from the dining expedition just two weeks ago.

When the restaurant is closed, Adria and his staff run a workshop in Barcelona where they spread the word of molecular cuisine. There you can buy special kitchen utensils such as an appliance which infuses air into specific parts of the dish, tiny and especially rapid freezers that are used to instantly change texture, vacuum tools and many more utensils usually found in the laboratory but in this case designed for the kitchen.

Goose liver with jellified berry candy

All of the ingredients used in molecular cooking are natural, free of chemicals and stabilizers, and the El Bulli homepage specifies the doctrine of the preparation technique. The dishes are served in many tiny portions; their taste, smell, and texture isn't fixed and must be adjusted accordingly; fresh ingredients such as fish and vegetables are given top priority; and there shall be no hierarchy of ingredients in the dish - the nut is as important as the tuna or the puree.

The meal at Messa, for example, features an olive with an altered texture, which bursts inside the mouth like an egg yolk, accompanied by whipped white cheese. Goose liver is topped with jellified berry candy, and the gin cocktail with hot lemon whip had fruit which refused to sink to the bottom of the glass because air had been infused into the alcoholic potion.

Is molecular cuisine aimed at intriguing and challenging only the diners? El Bulli has invented olive candy, and a basket made of solidified passion fruit juice and filled with mandarin extract. In one famous dish, the chicken and its juices traded places: The chicken was transformed into liquid, and its juices were solidified and became the primary component.

At The Fat Duck, chef Blumenthal serves a dish called "Voices of the Sea." The plate is designed like a beach, with seafood and seaweed resting on a bed of tapioca and Japanese breadcrumbs. It is served only after the guests listen to the sounds of ocean waves on an iPod for several minutes. The dish is accompanied by a martini glass resembling sea water. Blumenthal claims that a study held at Stanford University revealed that people who listened to the sound of the waves before they ate experienced a stronger and more intense flavor.

Fans of molecular cuisine swear that it isn't meant for the purpose of prestige and diversity. In the words of Barkarola's Dekers, "The purpose of molecular cooking is to develop futuristic dishes, increase variety and inspire full cooperation between chefs from different places around the globe in order to enrich local menus that pay respect to tradition.

"This is very thorough cooking, which makes use of technology for cooking purposes and advances the kitchen," adds Dekers. "After all, 50 years ago a Magimix appliance was considered odd, and today it's a staple in every home. At our restaurant we won't serve a strictly molecular meal, we will continue preparing comfort food. But this outlook definitely speaks to us: we've imported gelatin products from Spain, which are extracted from various strains of seaweed, some of them heat-resistant, others suitable for glazing. We'll serve steak with a twist, but we won't let the molecular component dominate the dish. I believe that when you gradually embed them, they will remain with us, they won't be another fleeting trend."