Strawberries With Sambuca Baba and Acid Honey

The El Bulli dish-name generator.

Chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, the famous Spanish restaurant that will serve its last meal on Saturday, is famous for working a sort of alchemy in the kitchen—transmuting disparate ingredients into dishes like "Irish coffee of green asparagus and black truffle jus" and "sea cucumbers with ham fat and hot yoghurt whey jelly." The names provoke a pumpkin seed croquant and chocolate mosaic of confusion and awe. They're also begging for satire.

El Bulli's website lists more than 1,200 dishes served between 1983 and 2005. I read through them all, studying their rhythms, syntax, and vocabulary for patterns. The result: an algorithm that generates random El Bulli-ish dish names. Each round of the game below contains one real El Bulli dish, selected from the restaurant's website, and two impostors. Can you spot the difference?

Bonus: Send us your best fake El Bulli dish name on Twitter, using the hashtag #elbullipitches, or leave your ideas in the comments. We'll scramble up a chef to prepare the best one.

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