“We accept the blurring of roles now more than we ever did before,” Ms. Millman said. But there is a catch. “The key with Adrià and any brand changing direction — you get one chance, maybe two, to use your brand and do something new. If it’s not successful, that’s generally it.”

To Mr. Adrià, success is a malleable concept — “We will know if we are doing well because we will feel it,” he explained — and there doesn’t seem to be much pressure from Telefónica to produce anything in particular. Unlike some artists, he is not shy about his corporate connections, and given the activities in the foundation’s loft, he does not seem afflicted by commercial concerns. He zigged and zagged from smaller-scale descriptions of documents (“this is a flow chart of a cucumber’s existence”) to grander, if occasionally vague and counterintuitive, proclamations about originality (“you don’t have to be passionate to be creative; you can just be professional about innovation”). Neither he nor his staffers appeared to be rushed.

He also seems uninterested in running his foundation as a typical start-up, and his rigid devotion to his own mantras can occasionally give the entire operation a cultish feel. Additionally, it isn’t obvious exactly how his ideas will make the leap from notion to project. Mr. Adrià has nominally divided the foundation into two main strands: knowledge, which is the group focused on creating BulliPedia; and creativity, which is focused on, in his words, “deconstructing the entire process of creativity.” He calls this group El Bulli DNA.

If the names of the various projects aren’t enough to keep straight, Mr. Adrià adds a few more: El Bulli Lab is the Barcelona-based office where people associated with El Bulli DNA do their work. That should not be confused with 6W Food, which may not get going for a few more years but is expected to be a sort of cross between a science museum, an art museum and a house of culinary innovation. Also in the works is a search engine known as SeaUrching (named in part for the delicacy) as well as a language to describe gastronomy known as Huevo, Spanish for egg. Huevo, it was noted by one of Mr. Adrià's colleagues, could ultimately be a digital language coded for use by refrigerators or other kitchen appliances.

At the conclusion of one of several long soliloquies, Mr. Adrià was asked what he expected the foundation’s budget to be for 2015. He took a breath. “One million euros,” he said. In response to a quizzical expression of doubt — moments earlier, he said he intended to have a staff approaching 75 — he explained, “We will hire a lot of interns.”

Then, before anyone else could speak, he started to explain a side project he was doing as a consultant with Cirque du Soleil in which, he said, “We are helping create a restaurant that is not a restaurant.”