Mugaritz

Mugaritz is a tasting-menu restaurant in a Basque farmhouse on the hills between Errenteria and Astigarraga, near San Sebastián. Its name joins the Basque words for border and oak, after an old oak that marks the line between the two towns beside the house. Andoni Luis Aduriz opened it in 1998, after cooking at El Bulli under Ferran Adrià.

The restaurant closes for several months every winter, and the kitchen team spends that time on research rather than service. Each season then starts with a new menu built from those trials, so few dishes return from one year to the next. Courses arrive in a long run of small plates with little explanation, and some are meant to be eaten with the fingers. The best known of them are the edible stones: small potatoes coated in grey kaolin clay, served so that they look like pebbles from a river bed.

Aduriz has written about cooking and science in a long row of books. Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking came out from Phaidon in English, and earlier titles dealt with young Basque cooking, cod and eggs, and a botanical dictionary for cooks. He also wrote the Spanish foreword to The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and edited a revised Spanish edition of the Larousse Gastronomique. The restaurant’s own creative team works apart from the dining room and tests ideas long before they reach a menu.

The Michelin Guide gave Mugaritz its first star in 2000 and a second one in the middle of that decade, and the restaurant has appeared on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for many years. The farmhouse stands among meadows and woods in the Gipuzkoa countryside, and a garden next to it grows herbs and flowers for the kitchen. Aduriz’s kitchen has trained many cooks who went on to open restaurants of their own in Spain and abroad.