All this attention was not part of some grand plan. In fact, Mr. Adrià says, in the beginning he had no plan; like so many careers, his began unintentionally. As a teenager, he said, he “accidentally” got a job washing dishes in a classic French restaurant in Barcelona, where the chef, a friend of his father, “made me memorize Escoffier.” A year later, at 18, he was bouncing from Ibiza to Barcelona to the countryside, “working in kitchens” — mostly as a line cook — “but thinking about women.”

In 1983 he arrived at El Bulli, then a French restaurant. Soon thereafter, the head chef quit, taking almost the entire staff with him. Mr. Adrià persuaded the manager to give him a shot at taking over. Business had already turned bad, so there was little to lose.

And so Mr. Adrià — at 21 — began to create his own cuisine. Not that he had any idea how this was going to happen, beyond an unyielding curiosity that made him question why food was cooked the way it was cooked.

One key was his recognition that in the creative world traditions are made to be broken. Mr. Adrià’s idea, as he describes it, was simply to “do new things with old concepts.” So, seeing chicken curry as a concept and determining to do something that hadn’t been done before, he developed a dish, now famous, in which the sauce is solid and the chicken liquid.

Over the years such attempts brought him increased attention, though more in Spain than elsewhere in Europe, and more there than in the States. In fact, 10 years ago I was walking down a street with the food writer Colman Andrews, who has written extensively about Catalan cuisine, when he asked, “Have you heard of this chef outside of Barcelona who’s doing smoke mousse?” (Mr. Adrià was passing wood smoke through a condensing coil to make real liquid smoke.) I had not.

In 1997 Michelin gave El Bulli three stars, and in 1999 Mr. Robuchon made his proclamation.

One result was the kind of worldwide attention that descends upon stars, though Mr. Adrià, either modestly or disingenuously, refuses to acknowledge its impact.