Recipes

This is part 9 of the series on San Sebastian, Girona, and Barcelona, Spain. Other parts of this series (as they become available) can be found at this link.

Note to self - don’t book two long tasting meals in one day while in San Sebastian. You will regret it.

We had already had pintxos two nights in a row. Even though the pintxos in San Sebastian are excellent, the area where they are located is not large, and it’s easy to get a pretty good sense of pintxos after a couple days eating your way through them.

So, we took the risk of booking a newly minted hot new restaurant in San Sebastian, Amelia. Amelia’s chef-owner Chef Paulo Airaudo was born in Argentina to Italian immigrants and has worked in many well-known places such as Arzak, The Fat Duck, and Magnolia in Italy.

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The cuisine at Amelia San Sebastian is international but focuses on seasonal and sustainable ingredients together with biodynamic wines. The restaurant mostly works with small, local producers for the food, even showing on a map (on the back of the menu) the various locations throughout Spain from which the raw ingredients originated. Though most ingredients come from Spain, a small handful of specialty ingredients come from other regions, such as Pecorino and EVOO from Italy and caviar from Denmark.

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Amelia, named after Chef Airaudo’s daughter Amélie, has seating for 22 diners and only serves tasting menus. The small, cozy dining space is beautifully decorated with a modern, Scandinavian style. At the same time, Darth Vader, storm troopers, Mario, and other fun, playful themes appear all over the restaurant. It’s clear that Chef Airaudo is a kid at heart and is not afraid to showcase his favorite characters. In fact, they even appear in some of the dishes . . .

If I had to come up with one word to describe the food at Amelia, I would say “sauce.” Chef Airaudo loves making different sauces, and there was a sauce poured table-side in virtually every single one of the dishes.

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This is part 8 of the series on San Sebastian, Girona, and Barcelona, Spain. Other parts of this series (as they become available) can be found at this link.

Dining at Mugaritz San Sebastian was unlike any restaurant experience I’ve ever had. After all, it is not so much about creating a fantastic gustatory experience. It’s a thought-provoking, mind-bending, fascinating exploration of food, wine, and the intricate interplay between the two.

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Chef Andoni Luis Adurizis, who previously worked at El Bulli, opened Mugaritz in 1998. Since then, he has devoted himself to continually pushing the boundaries of creativity, constantly studying, learning, and conducting research and development. In fact, Mugaritz closes for four months each year so that the team can focus on exploring, brainstorming, and creating.

Many say that to truly appreciate the brilliance of Mugaritz, you have to get the wine pairing, and I totally agree. At Mugaritz, the wine is not chosen to pair with the food, which often takes center stage. Instead, wine and food selection and pairing is done as a whole, or sometimes, the wine could even be chosen first.

The wine pairings at Mugaritz are really at another level. Instead of just having one glass of wine that is paired with a dish, you might taste through a flight of five different vintages of the same wine to pair with one dish. It’s so interesting to experience how a wine changes over the years, even while paired with the exact same dish. 

Reviews for Mugaritz are mixed. I can totally understand why it’s a polarizing restaurant. First of all, if you don’t get the wine pairing, I do think you are missing out on half the meal, since the pairings are so intricately tied to the food. (Having said that, the restaurant did tell us that the food selection changes if a customer does not order the pairing, since certain courses really don’t work without the wine). 

Second, a large part of what makes Mugaritz fun is how the menu creatively plays with expectations and how it surprises and delights along the way. If a diner is merely looking for foodgasms (for lack of a better word), Mugaritz is not that. There are some courses (which you will see later), which may not intrinsically taste that amazing, but they speak volumes about the relationship between a particular wine and the dish with which it is paired. Dining at Mugaritz is not just a taste experience, it is as much an intellectual and thought-provoking experience.  

Which is not to say that the food isn’t good. The food is impeccably presented and flavors are dialed in with precision. It’s clear that every element of every dish has a purpose, and it’s fun to explore that purpose. There were many, many dishes that we thought were transcendent. All in all, every single diner in our party absolutely loved the restaurant. In fact, it was all of our favorite restaurant of the entire trip . . . yes, even more than its 3-Michelin starred neighbors who score more highly on World’s 50 Best. Who knows, perhaps we are true food academics at heart and can totally appreciate Mugaritz and his team’s serious study into food and its component flavors, often down to the molecular level (which this former chemist loves!).

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This is part 7 of the series on San Sebastian, Girona, and Barcelona, Spain. Other parts of this series (as they become available) can be found at this link.

After years of eating at a wide variety of restaurants all around the world, I’ve realized that it’s extremely difficult to nail the perfect symphony of excellent food, warm service, inviting decor, and reasonable price point to continually bring customers back.

Most restaurants never reach the pinnacle of achieving all of these, but yet are able to survive because, at the end of the day, most customers are not so picky, especially if competition is scarce. Even in San Sebastian, arguably gastronomical capital of the world, we still noticed differences in the above-mentioned four key areas.

This is what makes Arzak so special and unique. It’s clear to me why so many people (such as Anthony Bourdain) are so loyal to this restaurant.

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