The missus and I turned off the main highway that runs between San Sebastian and Bilbao along the northern coast of Spain and headed south to find the town of Axpe and the remarkable restaurant Etxebarri. This is Basque Country, as you can tell by the great excess of x's in their words. They really like k's, as well. (Once you learn that tx is pronounced "ch," as in chewy, chunky, or churchmouse, you have mastered one of the thousand mysteries of the Basque people, whose origin is only a matter of conjecture. The province around San Sebastian is named Gipuzkoa. Does this look like any language you've ever seen?)

Here is what I had heard about Etxebarri: It occupies an old stone farmhouse. Most customers are locals. Everything on the long menu is grilled over wood coals, except for most of the lettuce, the bread, and the baby lamb, which is roasted in a wood-burning oven. The ingredients are the most perfect local fish and shellfish, lamb and beef. The grilling is masterly; people had told me that the ovens, the coals, and the techniques are like nothing you've ever seen. And that's just the beginning.

I must mention that consuming a mixed grill in the town of Axpe was not the point of our trip. We had come here to learn more about the great avant-garde chefs of Spain. Most of them are based either in Barcelona and the rest of Catalunya on the Mediterranean (where Ferran Adria, at El Bulli in the town of Roses, and now Joan Roca, in nearby Girona, reign) or along the Basque coast from the French border 75 miles west to the once-grimy city of Bilbao. These two regions plus the city of Madrid have inspired critics to claim that Spain is the new France, with young chefs who are producing the most inventive dishes in the Western world, the first true culinary breakthrough since the French nouvelle cuisine in the seventies and eighties. The purpose of our trip was to eat our way through the hypermodern cooking of the Basque Country while attending the Sixth Congreso in San Sebastian of Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia ("The Best of Gastronomy"), an exposition of chefs mainly from Spain but with several contributions from America, France, and Italy.

But for years I had wondered about Etxebarri. Yes, I am fascinated to the point of obsession, even to the point of madness, by the art of grilling meat over wood. Nothing less could have led my wife and me to head into the trackless wastes of El Pais Vasco (the Basque Country, in Spanish, which the Basques resent) only minutes after a transatlantic flight. Grilling or roasting meat (and the occasional vegetable) over or near burning or smoldering wood is humankind's initial, primeval gastronomic gesture, and it has never been bested. To pay a visit to a self-taught cook in the Basque Country who has reinvented this 10,000- or 50,000-year-old craft was an irresistible prospect.