disable drop cap
Like all truly great chefs, Victor Arguinzoniz is as creative as he is obsessive, and the kitchen he built for Etxebarri, his unassuming restaurant in Spain's Basque Country, looks like no other. An entire wall is lined by a long row of custom-made stainless-steel grills that smoothly glide up and down a system of tracks and cables with a couple of spins of a hand crank. Here, everything on the menu is cooked over an open flame, and the art of grilling has been raised to a level of sophistication unmatched anywhere.
"This type of cooking is primitive," Arguinzoniz told me one afternoon, amused that an American journalist would take an interest in his food. Spain, after all, is the center of the molecular gastronomy movement, where, at places like Ferran Adrià's El Bulli, surrealist dishes — sauces made with liquid nitrogen, seafood aerated into foam — are followed by a baroque check. But there's no technological sleight of hand at Etxebarri. "It's just product, of course, good product," Arguinzoniz says. "And you touch it as little as possible, because all of the flavors are brought out by the grill. Nothing more."
But, it turns out, there's much more. There are the chef's many innovations, like the sauté pan formed out of wire mesh that allows him to grill foie gras without melting it. And there's his curiosity, which drives him to push the limits of what can be cooked over an open flame. Can Arguinzoniz grill an egg? Yes. Coffee beans? Yes. Ice cream? In a way. Caviar? Not yet, but he's busy designing a new device that could make it work.
Much of Etxebarri's kitchen is taken up by two wood-burning ovens that Arguinzoniz uses to make his own charcoal. Every morning, he loads black oak into one, gnarled grapevines into the other, and throughout the day he has a ready supply of glowing coals. Each wood, he explains, has a different role. The oak is for delicate ingredients like seafood, while the vines give off an intensely smoky taste that lends itself to sturdy cuts of meat, like the region's culinary benchmark, chuleta, grilled rib eye. Arguinzoniz insists on a Galician cow that is at least eight years old (most American beef cattle are slaughtered before they're two); then he ages the meat for six weeks in his nearby barn. He leaves the rack whole, slicing off each chop to order with a small band saw. Scorched over high flames, then trimmed off the bone into neat strips and fanned on a plate, the tender meat is so deeply flavored it has the earthy taste of wild game. The only embellishment is a drizzle of warmed olive oil: There are no sauces at Etxebarri, nothing that might mask the food. It's just good product, touched as little as possible.
Etxebarri is in Axpe (pronounced AX-shpeh), a postcard-perfect Basque village found on only the most detailed maps. It's a 40-minute drive from Bilbao along a mostly uninspired route that suddenly becomes lush and pastoral once you make the final turn to the town. The restaurant sits on the tiny Plaza San Juan, along with the church and municipal jai alai court, and, like all the buildings in Axpe, it has thick stone walls and small windows. (It was built in 1800.) The 46-year-old Arguinzoniz was born in this village, and his father, now 83, still farms the family land and grows almost all of Etxebarri's vegetables. Arguinzoniz has an aw-shucks modesty and little interest in becoming a public personality. Before he cooked for a living, he was a forester, and if he ever has a free afternoon he'll spend it hiking through the craggy Urkiola Mountains, which loom behind Axpe. His restaurant is the village hangout; the ground floor serves as the local pub. Arguinzoniz took it over 17 years ago, and it's the only place where the self-taught chef has ever cooked.
