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A Cook’s Tour
By Phyllis Richman, September & October 2005
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We spent the morning touring the museum and then walked over to Zortziko,
Bilbao's most celebrated restaurant, where chef Daniel García took
us behind the scenes for a formal cooking lesson, along with an eight-course
lunch.
"This is the most precious part of Basque cuisine," García
said as he held up a plate of anchovies. The small fish have been a mainstay of
Basque cuisine for centuries; even today Spain consumes three fourths of its
anchovy production.
García quickly turned his fresh anchovies into hors d'oeuvres:
they were filleted and sprinkled with olive oil, sandwiched between bread
sliced nearly paper-thin on a ham slicer, then sautéed. The bread became
a mere crackle encasing the succulent anchovies. The second appetizer was foie
gras whipped to a light mousse and layered with caramelized pears and wine
jelly. The foie gras was double creaminess: as light as whipped cream, as rich
and silky as ice cream, the pears just respectfully sweet. Its preparation
involved a bowl of ice, a thermometer, and an assistant.
"This is just the kind of dish best left to a restaurant kitchen,"
I whispered to Ginny. "When I saw the blenders and thermometers, I knew we
weren't going to make these dishes at home," she replied.
Susan didn't care. "That dish blew me away." Not that she
meant to slight the fried oysters with orange peel and potato purée that
followed, or the rare tuna in cold vegetable soup, or the black cod, or the
pigeon. This was the elegant alchemy we'd come this distance to try.
That lunch also inspired us to ask more questions at all the restaurants
where we dined. That very evening we started turning our restaurant meals into
informal classes.
At Etxebarri, a rustic, stone mecca of wood-stove cookery where we had
dinner, we asked to meet the chef and tour the kitchen after a feast that
started with the best Iberian ham we'd ever tasted, lobster and artichoke
salad, and soft and tangy chorizo. Then came the extraordinary wood-grilled
entrées: garlicky fish, perfectly crusty yet blood-rare steak, even
grilled risotto and a grilled apple tart with smoked ice cream.
"How do you smoke ice cream?" asked Marcia once we'd crowded
into the closet-size kitchen. A shy young man was showing us the steak
machinery, a kind of giant George Foreman grill. Despite our language barrier,
he explained that the ice cream started with milk, not cream, and was reduced
in a flat clay paella pan on the grill so that by the time it was as thick as
cream it had absorbed the surrounding smoke.
A few feet away, an argument was building among our group.
"Where's the chef?"
"He is the chef."
"Don't be ridiculous. He's too young to be the chef."
Ellen had brought along an article about Etxebarri from Vogue
magazine, and she showed it to the young man. He looked puzzled by the article,
then embarrassed. He was indeed the chef, Victor Arguinzoniz, age 35, but
cooking like a seasoned master.
On the trip back to the hotel, we chewed over his modesty. "He seems so
humble," said Susan. "Perhaps not for long," I replied, having
watched a lot of young chefs who learned over time to believe their own
press.
One restaurateur who clearly deserves the acclaim he is getting is Juan Mari
Arzak, whose restaurant we visited several days into our vacation. Arzak
started Spain's experimental frenzy when he took over the family restaurant
from his mother in 1967. As we entered Arzak's cozy dining room a few
blocks' walk from our hotel, we were struck by the simplicity of the
restaurant's décor. Yet the food was anything but simple. A parade
of brightly colored hors d'oeuvres arrived in swift
succession—pineapple with peppers, blood sausage with apple, plantains
with fish mousse. This was followed by flowers of caramelized mango stuffed
with foie gras mousse on a "stem" of shredded lettuce with oil and
tomato vinegar, then oysters in a filmy gauze of bacon-and-potato
"paper."
Every time we looked quizzical, a waitress would explain the dish's
technique. Then Arzak himself started showing up to reveal each dish's
recipe.
A cube of rare lamb, loosely wrapped in a tall veil of beige gauze, which
melted when sauce was poured on: "The veil is milky coffee cooked between
two Silpat baking sheets."
A flower-shaped poached egg: Arzak brought to the table a very fresh egg and
a cup lined with plastic wrap, then broke the egg into the cup. "Season it
with salt, pepper, white-truffle oil, and duck fat," he instructed,
"then twist the plastic tightly to enclose the egg and tie it. Let it rest
for a day, then poach it."
The dessert array was like a toy box, with chocolate "hamburger"
and pepper-spiked chocolate ice cream. Some sweets bubbled with dry ice; others
startled with accents of olive or spinach.
Then we were invited into the kitchen. To our surprise, it wasn't the
magic shop we imagined it would be. It was just a kitchen.
On the walk home, everyone relived the menu, dish by dish, high on the
colors, the shapes, the sheer fun. Arzak had made it look easy. After his
instructions, we could certainly approximate some of the dishes at home. But to
prepare most of them, we'd need Arzak's genius—and a staff to
back us up.
Between restaurants and classes we toured food markets, including the weekly
outdoor market at Ordizia.
One morning we toured the shops, the market, and an anchovy factory around
Getaria, less than an hour from San Sebastián. The Nardin anchovy
factory is a family business that looks like an overgrown garage. We nodded to
the women engaged in the laborious work of trimming the tiny fish and arranging
them one by one in the cans. The fish are processed—smoked, vinegared or
salted, and covered with olive oil—as soon as they arrive from the pier,
then left to cure up to two years. "I'll never take a caesar salad for
granted again," Linda said.
We had remarkable anchovies for lunch afterward in an old-fashioned
lace-curtain restaurant named Elkano that overlooks the sea. Father and son,
Pedro and Aitor Arregui, cure their own anchovies and tuna, which at lunch were
followed by briny clams, blue lobster from their basement tanks, then salad and
vegetables. The climax of the meal was fish—sole, turbot, and
hake—served alone, un-adorned, and perfect, always whole except for the
gelatinous hake jowl that we were instructed to eat in one bite. We'd never
had fish more resoundingly succulent.
Friday was our last day in San Sebastián, and after five days I
thought we had scaled its culinary heights. Once again, I was in for a
surprise. After a morning off, we were way behind schedule when we arrived at
Mugaritz restaurant. Owned by Andoni Luis Aduriz, a 34-year-old chef who has
been described as the "boy wonder of global cuisine,"
Mugaritz—with its Zen-like atmosphere—was just what we needed after
a week of nonstop activity.
"Everything here is made in the moment—the herbs, the sauces,
everything," said the maitre d' as he ushered us in. He was nearly
whispering.
"When does the masseuse come out?" Ginny muttered.
We launched into the first of eight courses, a warm, gingery gelatin disk
embedded with wild asparagus tips.
"I feel like praying every time I get a vegetable," said Denise as
the waiter placed a bowl of tiny flowers with baby eggplants, beans, and greens
before us.
"I can't believe this is just beef," added Susan when the hunk
of beef cheek arrived, having been cooked with red pepper for 45 hours until
the two nearly melted together.
And on it went until dessert.
"Omigod," said Ellen and Ginny in unison. They were diving into
the torrijas that the waiter had brought. It was French toast, our favorite
dish from the cooking schools, but this time, precise one-inch cubes, yolk-rich
and soft as whipped cream in the middle, its surfaces crackly like the caramel
on crème brûlée. Once more, today's chefs had
brilliantly updated tradition.
We flew home vowing to return to San Sebastián. We'd left several
famous chefs' restaurants untried, countless tapas bars unvisited, the
foods of other seasons untasted. But we'd sampled the Basque country's
newest creations and the traditions behind them. Those memories, a few tins of
anchovies and olives, and a stack of recipes would have to hold us until our
return.
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