Fiction, backed by the most influential chef on the international scene, narrates how elBulli became the best restaurant in the world and how it placed Catalan cuisine on the global map
The filming of “Gènesi”,, which ends on February 13th, manages to recover the past, present and future of the gastronomic revolution led by Ferran Adrià. It is the first gastronomic fiction series focused on the figure of the renowned Catalan chef and it will be broadcast on TV3 and on the 3Cat platform in the autumn of 2026, as an exclusive and in Catalan.
Coproduced by 3Cat with Minoria Absoluta, Fischcorb and Emulsió Films AIE, with the support of the Government of Catalonia and the support of ICEC, Gènesi will have six episodes based on real events, but with dramatic licenses that make up an alliance between culture, audiovisual, gastronomy, territory and product.
This fiction, which explains Catalonia to the global public, was born with a marked international ambition to show Catalan gastronomic creativity to the world.
After its premiere in 3Cat, Gènesi will eventually come to Netflix, which participates in the project and will also distribute it to the rest of Spain and Latin America.
This fiction has been endorsed by Ferran Adrià of the elBulli Foundation, which has given plausibility and rigor to all the cooking sequences in the series.
Behind the scenes, in a sophisticated kitchen in front of the set that has everything needed to transfer Catalan gastronomic innovation to fiction, a team of chefs who had worked at elBulli, such as Eduard Bosch and Marc Cuspinera, have prepared the more than 70 dishes that appear in the fiction.
Depending on the narrative moment of the story, these dishes have been jointly chosen by Ferran Adrià himself and David Pujol, director of the series, out of 1846 dishes that they cooked in elBulli. Each dish that appears in the fiction has several versions, depending on its cooking difficulty.
Gènesi also is a display of the Catalan territory, because it has been shot in several emblematic locations that represent the beginning of Ferran Adrià’s culinary career and show his admiration for the zero-kilometre product, which is born and grown in Catalonia.
The actor Miquel Fernández plays as Ferran Adrià and Ivan Massagué plays as Juli Soler, both part of a cast that also features Carlos Cuevas in the role of Albert Adrià and Mónica López, who plays a prestigious culinary critic.
All the actors and actresses have prepared themselves conscientiously to recreate the real characters to the maximum extent. They did several sessions with Ferran Adrià’s team to immerse themselves in the role of being a cook and to learn notions of cooking and product treatment.
