In the seventh episode of our "High Performance Chef" video series in cooperation with MICHELIN Guide, we visit San Sebastián on the Basque coast to meet 3-starred chef Elena Arzak. Her restaurant, Arzak, has been a staple in the MICHELIN Guide for almost 50 years.
Elena Arzak was born into cooking. “It is in my DNA,” she says, in a manner that is more fact than cliché. The daughter of the influential Spanish chef Juan Mari Arzak, her own influence is such that she has been credited with heralding a New New Basque cuisine. Elena is the fourth generation of Arzaks to work at her family’s eponymous restaurant; she had her first stint in the kitchen at 11. “It was the engine of the family,” Elena says. “So it was a lot of responsibility. But I like challenges, I like difficult. I told myself, ‘If I’m going to do it, it will be the focus of my life’.”
Arzak, which Elena runs with her father, has three MICHELIN stars. In 2012, she was named the World’s Best Female Chef. She carries herself as though neither of those facts are true. “I learned to be humble,” Elena says. “There are many MICHELIN chefs in the area, and my father taught me to live with that pressure. If he didn’t like something, he would say, ‘Elena, are you joking? What is this plate? What were you thinking?’ He taught me how to be open to critique.”
San Sebastián has more MICHELIN stars (18) than churches (17) and on most days the air smells juicy and highly edible. Food is the divine calling for many who visit the town and Arzak’s dishes are, in a word, heavenly. Take, for example, the verdel e hinojo marino: market-fresh mackerel in a pool of white garlic sauce with pear concasse, fennel butter, dill oil, coriander seeds, and samphire. Nothing wild but wildly fantastic. Elena’s gift is taking what she calls the “Basque essence” – seasonal herbs and vegetables, sauces, things from the sea – and subjecting it to a special kind of family-honed alchemy. Techniques like papier-mâché are particularly Arzakesque.
The magic happens in a dark room upstairs from the restaurant which could be reasonably mistaken for a perfume or pharmaceutical lab. There are test tubes and beakers and what seem to be surgical instruments, as well as a wall of metal shelves holding hundreds of meticulously organized foodstuffs. Some look unfit for human consumption but tantalizing nonetheless. We’re told there is a 3-D printer whose potential the team are still figuring out how to harness. It is here in the lab where Elena, her father, and a creative team dream up new dishes. Usually, it takes two months before an idea, which has been tested in five or so different iterations, is ready to debut in the dining room. “Perfection takes time,” Elena says. “We need to guarantee that perfection can be repeated. A dish needs to be perfect again and again and again.”
And how to describe the dishes? Picture exotic butterflies observed through a kaleidoscope. Non-geometric shapes scattered about the plate, sitting atop puddles and smudges of sauces of varying viscosity. There are so many sauces. The colours are extraordinary: azure, canary, indigo, ink. When plates come out and hit the linen, diners are wowed. Most are immaculately dressed. At least one woman is wearing a gown. “Guests come with very high expectations but they also trust us,” Elena says. “For that we can thank MICHELIN and also the strength of the chefs in the area.”
Recipe-Download
Exclusively for AMG Private Lounge members: download Elena Arzak’s recipe. Have fun in the kitchen!
Basqueness permeates not only Elena’s kitchen but also her character – tenacious, frank, proud. There is an air of nobleness about her. “We are very direct people,” she says. “My father was very strict on himself, in a good way. To be very good, you need to be open and you need to know what you want to do well.” Success, like cooking, runs in the family. Elena’s great-grandparents built and lived in the house that is now Arzak. It was originally opened as a tavern in 1897.
By the mid-1970s, the restaurant emerged as a shrine of New Basque cuisine, fuelled by the new direction Juan Mari and his contemporaries, like Pedro Subijana of the nearby Akelarre restaurant, had taken regional fare. Arzak earned its first MICHELIN star in 1974. Four years later, it was awarded a second. The third came in 1989. “My father and I have worked together for 25 years … and we never lost the MICHELIN stars,” Elena says. “Innovation is essential. Otherwise you don’t get technique, you don’t get texture, you don’t get new results.”
A proud donostiarra (the word for someone from San Sebastián), Elena broke briefly from her everyday frenzy to show us around: to the Bretxa and San Martin markets, two vital sources of ingredients for local chefs, through the lush rolling hills that surround the bay, and finally to the sea itself, which governs so much of San Sebastián life. But it was at the market where Elena appeared most in her element. She and the vendors are on a first-name basis and greet each other in an old-world way that seems of a bygone era. It’s been that way for generations. “My grandmother was sustainable without knowing the word,” Elena says. “We have always had and still have a very strong relationship with the producers. They give us a lot of ideas.”
After the markets, we took some time to cruise the coastal roads, an exhilarating drive made more so by the fact that we’re sitting in an AMG GT Roadster. “Like cooking, driving is freedom,” Elena says. “They are also similar when it comes to innovation: it’s about getting better, more efficient, more sustainable.”
Arzak often juggles several thoughts simultaneously and when she speaks, they sometimes come out at the same time, or one interrupts another before she eventually circles back to the original thought. In any case, she often finishes a sentence by asking “you understand?” to make sure the listener has kept pace. Except when asked what she would be doing if she weren’t a chef: “I have no idea. I cannot imagine doing anything else.” Understood.
