We're famous!
The NY Times ran a story about Basque restaurants yesterday, complete with a photo of San Seb! I'm going to copy it for ya here, because I know you're too lazy to register at the site...
Basque Chefs, Sharing the Glory
JM Zabala for The New York TimesA NEW WAY TO NIBBLE The port of San Sebastián, Spain.
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
Published: May 5, 2004
AN SEBASTIÁN, Spain
IT is Easter morning. Here among the hardy Basques, famous for their prowess as shepherds in their hilly homeland and also as émigrés in the American West, paschal lamb for lunch seems inevitable, and the inevitable comes to pass.
But we are at Arzak, the crowded, rather plain little roadside restaurant elevated into the stratosphere of European gastronomy by Juan Mari Arzak, the founding father of modern Spanish cuisine, and now directed by his winsome 34-year-old daughter, Elena Arzak Espina. Rather than run-of-the-mill lamb, a faintly gamy deboned chop comes to the table wearing a tissuelike coffee-flavored "veil" - a taste-enhancing shroud made by baking a layer of café con leche between sheets of Silpat pan liner.
Sounds weird, tastes great. With the hot pan juices poured over the meat, partly melting the "veil," you get a sauce remarkably reminiscent of American red-eye gravy.
While Mr. Arzak, stocky and outgoing, chats up the customers - "Are you very hungry, or just a little? Do you like oysters? Chocolate? Have some eggs, I love eggs" - Ms. Arzak Espina, dark, petite and perfectly groomed, runs the kitchen.
Her food is modern and entertaining, often witty, never overwrought. She limits herself largely to local ingredients, ingeniously cooked and combined, playing tradition against innovation, though she knows perfectly well how to handle exotica like lemon grass, too. Arzak doesn't shout, either on its plates or in the look of its dining room, which is exemplified by motherly waitresses in gray pinafores. Its wine list includes eight vintages of Vega Sicilia, Spain's finest, and Mr. Arzak produced a rare 1954 Rioja for our celebratory lunch, but you can also have a bottle of white txakoli, the slightly fizzy local tipple, for $25.
Warm foie gras arrives with a pear poached in fino sherry with a touch of mint, blanched to mute its flavor, plus hints of saffron and turmeric to perfect the balance between sweet and acid. An egg, seasoned with house-made truffle oil, is wrapped in plastic film, poached and served with a slim txistorra sausage made not just with the traditional paprika but with dates as well. The egg emerges looking a little like a flower, and cutting into the ravishingly milky white reveals a richly orange yolk.
The tasting menu concludes with a spray of desserts, including skewered fruits, caramelized over charcoal, with an emulsified orange sauce. Delicious, but not quite as good, in my view, as what Mr. Arzak, whose mother established the restaurant, called "our ugly chocolate tortilla" - a ragged, luscious omelet with a slightly sour aftertaste, produced by incorporating minute amounts of tamarind and passion fruit in the batter.
"There's no way to make it pretty," Ms. Arzak said as she and her father sat in the cozy bar with my wife, Betsey, and me for an after-lunch drink. "I've tried." He insisted that its looks don't matter, but she kept asking us intently whether we cared. That, like so much about Arzak, typifies the contemporary Basque culinary spirit - experimental, questing, hard to satisfy, but proudly, solidly anchored in local tradition.
In this region, unlike many, no gulf of hostility yawns between classical cooks and innovators or grand restaurants and humbler ones. As we left, Mr. Arzak handed me, unbidden, a list of his favorite spots for tapas, known here as pintxos. "No hierarchy," said Martin Berasategui, who like the Arzaks holds three Michelin stars. "We all have our feet in the same Basque soil."
San Sebastián, a resort city of 180,000 framed by two hills facing a scallop-shaped bay, is rapidly gaining renown throughout Europe as a gastronomic capital, rivaled in Spain only by Barcelona. It benefits from primary materials of the first order, especially seafood. Inshore waters yield spectacular turbot and delicate chipirones, or baby squid, and since medieval times, Basque fishermen have ranged as far as the Grand Banks in search of cod. Dried and salted, it remains the locals' favorite fish. In the markets, mackerel are so shiny that you could almost use them as mirrors.
Every January, people march in San Sebastián's Tamborrada parade with giant forks and spoons rather than rifles carried at shoulder arms. Dozens of mostly male eating clubs maintain kitchens where members prepare dinner for each other. In this elaborate, venerable food culture, with 10 Michelin-starred restaurants in or near the city, "everybody is encouraged to cook, and chefs become popular heroes, like football stars," said Visi Irizár, who runs the cooking school founded by her father, Luís.
Eating pintxos is a highly ritualistic activity. Most people cruise with their cuadrilla, a group of up to 20 people to which many will belong for their entire adult lives, making 10 or 15 stops in a night. The rules: One drink (wine, beer or hard cider, poured from on high into a tumbler with walls as thin as a light bulb's) and one or two tapas at each bar. Throw your used paper napkin on the floor. Keep track of what you've consumed - it's up to you to tell the bartender when you leave. And no tips.
"You ask yourself, `What is the exact taste I want tonight?' and then go out and have it," explained Gabriella Ranelli, a former New Yorker who has lived here with her husband, a Basque, for more than a decade. "You compose your own meal."
There are classic pintxos like the Gilda, a skewer of moderately hot guindilla peppers, olives and salted anchovies, so called because it seemed as spicy, to the Basque palate, as Rita Hayworth in her classic 1946 movie of that name. And there are creative pintxos, like those at La Cuchara de San Telmo, a hole in the wall hidden in the narrow calles of the old town, where you force your way through the scrum at the door and order miniature marvels like marinated tuna belly and bacalao or salt cod fried in beer batter, which are made by three former restaurant chefs laboring in a sandbox-size kitchen.
As if to emphasize the unity between haute cuisine and bar snacks, La Cuchara serves a mini-stack of foie gras, smoked eel and caramelized apple, in emulation of the mille-feuille originated by Mr. Berasategui.
Astelena, just off Constitution Square, which is built in the same style as the Cabildo in New Orleans, specializes in rockfish mousse and cod with onions. Txepetxa is renowned for its anchovies, winning prizes for a pintxo of house-marinated fillets of fish on toast topped with urchin roe. Ganbara, which resembles a ship's cabin, thrills mushroom-lovers like me with mounds of cèpes and chanterelles. Grilled with parsley, salt and oil, piled on rough bread and served with tiny beers called zuritos, they are irresistible, as is the silky salt-cured Jabugo ham at La Cepa, made from acorn-fed pata negra pigs and sliced wafer thin.
The bar at Bergara, several blocks from the Parte Vieja or Old Town in a neighborhood called Gros, is completely covered by colorful dishes laden with elaborate modern pintxos like duckling with Calvados, pine nuts and apple, and foie gras with mango and caramel. All are prepared and presented with meticulous care.
Infinite attention to detail is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of Basque cuisine. Betsey and I began to understand that more fully when we drove out to Axpe, a mountain hamlet about halfway between Bilbao and San Sebastián, for dinner at Etxebarri. There Victor Arguinzoniz, a chef as zealous as any I have ever met, makes his own charcoal every morning in an oxygen-controlled oven, then uses it that evening to cook meat and fish on a grill of his own design that applies heat from both top and bottom.
In his hands, sea cucumbers and barnacles (percebes), which had stymied us on a trip to Galicia some years earlier, tasted like the briny delicacies that they are, and the waitress in the big, barny dining room took the trouble to show us how to eat them. But it was the grilled items - fat, fleshy anchovies, pasta-slim baby eels cooked in a special pan Mr. Arguinzoniz invented, and a supple, tender, carmine-red côte de boeuf - that made us wonder how Michelin could have missed the place. All tasted as if they had barely been heated, almost as if they had been cooked from the inside out.
The secret, I finally decided, was pinpoint control of heat, achieved by moving the hot coals up and down. Precision was also evident at Elkano, a fish house on the seafront at Getaría, west of San Sebastián, a town noteworthy (in the nongastronomic sphere) as the birthplace of Cristobal Balenciaga, the couturier, and Juan Sebastián Elcano, captain of the only one of Magellan's ships to complete the first circumnavigation.
Greeted as if we were members of the royal family and not the only foreigners eating a Maundy Thursday lunch, we were amazed by the freshness and coloring of local prawns, an intense coral pink with bold, dark stripes. A slim gray turbot came off the grill moist and subtly flavored, its natural gelatin preserved through slow cooking. It was served without sauce, oil, lemon or garnish, and tasted fine as it was, although like many Basque dishes it was too heavily salted for our liking.
Again, a series of natural, unadorned tastes. When I asked Pedro Arregui, the owner, for lemon, he answered, "Lemon is for fish that isn't fresh." When I asked him whether the fish was local, he pointed out to sea and said, "There, or nothing."
... then he goes on to talk about some other Basque town. I'd be suprised if you were interested enough to read this whole thing, so I'll spare you the rest of it :o)