Arzak: A Rare Fine Dining Win
My faith in haute cuisine is still shaken, but this dinner did not disappoint
I’ve eaten in many temples of haute cuisine, and I am here to say that most have left me deeply unsatisfied. A recent night at Arzak, in San Sebastian, Spain, did not. But it is the exception that proves the rule.
Ultra high-end dining tends toward the soulless. It seems needy, in a sort of look-at-me way at best, and at its worst, it can be a vehicle for toxic masculinity. And most haute cuisine simply isn’t as delicious as far lower-end experiences: After one swankalicious debacle, I stopped for carnitas tacos at a local truck on my way home, which were a thousand times better than what I’d just eaten.
My friends who love this sort of dining scoff, saying it’s me, not the food, that I’m too low-brow to appreciate it. Srsly? Of all the people to toss that one at, you don’t think I “get” fancy food? Hell, I’ve cooked it for years, off and on.
I can make your foams and colloidal “caviar,” various trompe l’oeil fancies, broths so clear you can read a dime at the bottom of a stockpot full of it, sauces so smooth you want to moisturize with them.
I ultimately gave it up almost entirely because I’d rather cook — and help you to cook — a perfect venison steak or duck breast or trout or whatever, than prance about making food no one will make on their own, or, really, want to eat.
Still, I try to keep my mind open. I was in Oaxaca recently, and I ate at Criollo, allegedly one of the finest restaurants in Mexico. Um, it was by far the most disappointing meal I ate there. Even tourist tlacoyos were better. Every single dish I ate that night was meh, at best. Everything lacked acidity and depth, and there wasn’t even a hat tip to mole or chapulines or sopa de guia, or any of a hundred other traditional Oaxacan dishes they could have played with.
I keep going to such places because I reckon that one day I’d be proven wrong. And last month in Spain, I was. Finally.
Arzak is an ancient restaurant, founded in 1897, and the current chef is Elena Arzak, heir to her father Juan Mari Arzak’s throne. The restaurant holds three Michelin stars, and has been voted as one of the planet’s top three restaurants more than once. If anywhere was going to be the real deal, it was here.
Every dish in the tasting menu was at the very least good, and some were holy-shit-good. Basque cuisine is their touchstone, and I could see in their plates echoes of traditional Basque dishes like hake with green sauce or cod pil pil. I make both dishes the traditional way, so it was fun to see these riffs — and it was all delicious.
Balance, color, temperature, flavors, strength, all came together like a symphony, conducted by chef Arzak. My brother and I left sated but not swollen, as I’d felt after places like the French Laundry, Eleven Madison Park and such.
As a side note, when I design tasting menus, which isn’t often these days, I follow Chef Paul Bertolli’s advice to start with dessert and work backwards. This, when done correctly, not only highlights the pastry chef’s work (she’s usually a she and usually gets shafted by the savory cooks who overstuff the guests before she has a chance to shine), but it also helps you regulate portion size while offering echoes to the previous courses — maybe nuts here, maple, a fruit, even colors and textures. Arzak clearly did this.
Their service was epic, as you might imagine with a three-star restaurant. I felt cared for without the obsequiousness I got later in the trip at a dinner at the Four Seasons in Madrid. (That dinner was great, too, but not in the same league as Arzak.) And for the record, my brother paid for the hotel room…
Chef Arzak was gracious and kind to us, too. When she found out I was a chef, she offered me a quick tour of the kitchen, which I took. It was as I imagined: Controlled chaos. The team was swarming over dishes that each had more than a dozen “touches” to them (a “touch” is a term for an element that must go on the plate before it can be “sold,” or sent to the diner), so the plates would go out perfect and hot.
There were at least two dozen cooks on the line, which wasn’t terribly large. This didn’t surprise me, either. And it gets to the core reason I am so uncomfortable about even great fine dining. It’s elitist and unsustainable.
Dinner with wine for my brother and me cost damn near $1000. To me that is a gigantic bill, one I could swing once a year, maybe twice. Around us were several parties the waitstaff knew — regulars. Luxetarians at other tables ordered extras and lots more wine, etc. I felt like an imposter sitting there: One of the help who got to eat the food this one time. This might be why Chef Arzak was so kind. She knew how big a deal this meal was to me, where it was simply a nice Wednesday night to most of the room.
Temples of fine dining are just that: temples. Not everyone gets to go inside.
I am conflicted about this. At its best, I learn by eating there. I take mental notes, sometimes pictures, and try to reverse engineer certain elements in a simplified way that I can translate into a dish you and I can actually make. Think of me sort of like Target or Marshall’s, translating high fashion to the masses.
And I understand that putting on a show the way Arzak does is fearsomely expensive, and the price tag must reflect that. Who can afford that? Either middle-of-the-road people like me, who save their money for a one-time experience — or the rich, when they’re not off imploding at the bottom of the ocean.
But even this cost is subsidized by the labor of cooks like me. A great many chefs I know have thrown everything aside for the chance to work for free at one of these temples, just so they can learn techniques that they can then carry with them back home.
We pay our own way to get to Europe or wherever, find our own housing, and then work like dogs, often doing things like mincing onions, or working on one tiny element of one dish, for weeks or months. Ask any chef you know: They’ve either done it themselves, or know someone who has.
I am conflicted about this, too. Honestly? I’d do it at Arzak or NOMA or Alinea, or Pujol in Mexico City (owned by Enrique Olvera, who owns Criollo; my dinner in CDMX was far better). Because yeah, you might be glazing a pigeon breast every night for a month, but you get to watch the rest of the process, interact with other great chefs, and learn.
But at what cost? The stage system has also burned people to a cinder, leaving them so disillusioned with fine dining that they go off and run a taco truck in Fargo or Los Cruces. And truthfully, that’s not such a bad thing.
I am glad I went to Arzak. The food was amazing, as was the service, as was the hospitality of Chef Arzak herself. Would I go back? Maybe, if only to bring someone I care about, so he or she could experience what I did. Until then, I’ll stick to tacos.
Because of my temporary roommate, I've been watching or listening to a lot of cooking shows on the Food Network and I've noticed something interesting. Most of the chefs who are European and/or European trained shy away from bold cooking of any kind. They tend to lean towards a 'refined' palate that harmonizes tastes to the point that what they cook is monotonous. What a lot of the judges on some of the shows say is that the dishes don't really stand out or the dishes lack a spark. Often they complain about not being able to taste components they know are there. I'm wondering if the European tradition of fine dining is stifling chefs' palates and creativity to the point that only really good chef scan make dishes that actually taste good and are satisfying. Something to think on.
By the way, here's something you might find interesting: The show Chopped is a competition show where different chefs have to make various dishes featuring four necessary ingredients for each of three courses: Appetizer, Main Course and Dessert. The Food Network recently ran a marathon of Chopped episodes where one of the necessary ingredients in each course was game meat. They had to include some form of Bison, venison, game bird, wild caught fish (that wasn't commercially available normally) or wild caught (again not normally commercially available) shellfish in every dish. And the European born and trained chefs didn't fair so well. Most were eliminated in the early rounds mainly because they didn't integrate the game meat well enough in their dishes. In many cases, the problem was that the game meat was an afterthought to the dish, not a thought out part of it. Asian trained and North and South American chefs faired far better.
I have noticed the same thing as Tammy. Even in the pedestrian and overexposed Beat Bobby Flay shows, judges are starting to focus closely on seasoning, on enhancing the flavor of the main ingredient and not cluttering up the dish with extraneous ingredients. In other words, less is more. Let’s hear it for less pretentiousness and more focus on REAL food!
Thank you Hank, for bringing this to light.