El Bulli drama 'G\u00e8nesi' premieres at San Sebastian ahead of Netflix rollout
The restaurant voted the world's best five times is back as television drama.
"Gènesi," a six-part series about the origin of Catalonia's El Bulli, showed its first two episodes at the San Sebastian Film Festival on Sept. 21 and aired in Catalonia on the same day, according to Variety. The festival run, from Sept. 18 to Sept. 26, gave the Catalan-language production a festival launch before its wider rollout.
The story is set in the 1980s. A young Ferran Adrià arrives at El Bulli by chance, and the series follows how a small coastal restaurant began its climb to three Michelin stars, the guide's highest rating, before it closed in 2011. The focus stays on three people: chef Ferran Adrià, manager and co-owner Juli Soler and Albert Adrià.
Miquel Fernández plays Ferran Adrià. Iván Massagué plays Soler. Director David Pujol, who was born in Andorra in 1970 and previously directed the documentary series "elBulli: Historia de un sueño" in 2010, led the new dramatised version. Adrià, Pujol, Fernández, Carlos Cuevas and Joana Vilapuig attended the San Sebastian presentation.
In Catalonia, viewers can watch on two outlets at once. Broadcaster 3Cat released "Gènesi" simultaneously on its TV3 channel and on the 3Cat streaming platform, with two new episodes arriving every Monday, according to 3Cat. 3Cat said the festival presentation received an excellent reception in Donostia.
The series is a 3Cat production with Minoria Absoluta and Fishcorb Media, made in collaboration with the Government of Catalonia and with support from ICEC, the Catalan institute for cultural companies. It was conceived in 2025 to coincide with Catalonia's designation as a World Gastronomy Region. It also carries the endorsement and backing of Adrià himself.
Distribution beyond Catalonia is already organised. Netflix will carry "Gènesi" in the rest of Spain, Europe, Latin America and the United States. International sales, meaning the business of selling the series territory by territory, are handled by New Regency, which planned to offer it to buyers at Mipcom, the autumn television market in Cannes, after the San Sebastián premiere.
For viewers, this means the food on screen is close to the original. Chefs Marc Cuspinera, Alain Devhaive and Eduard Bosch-Lalo recreated El Bulli dishes for the shoot, while the wider story also covers traditional Catalan cooking, local produce and landscape, according to the San Sebastian Festival.
