The fine philosophy of the world’s third best kitchen
THEY do things differently in Spain – the football, the recessions and the food. Definitely the food. I’m not talking about the penchant for eating fried calamari in a baguette (carbs? What carbs?) or the way meat trumps vegetables every time or the archetypal beauty of the jamon. No, I’m talking about philosophy: an unironic, earnest and near-incomprehensible philosophy of food.
San Sebastian, the world’s most densely packed zone of haute-gastronomy restaurants, buzzes with it. But surely it is rare, even there, for a restaurant to be quite so philosophical as Mugaritz. Reads the website, in the “food” section: “The table centrepieces… rotate, oscillate and sway gain momentum. When the table lights up, the to-ing and fro-ing grows weaker. In an allegory of desired balance, they stop.” Compare that to a British chef, who would probably go no further with “philosophy” than say he likes things “fresh, local and seasonal”.
Despite talk of “sway gain momentum”, Andoni Luis Aduriz is no crank. His “edible stones” – potatoes dusted in an edible clay dust called caulin – really do play with your perceptions. His suspiciously meat-like “vegetable carpaccio” really does make you question what you know to be plant and what animal. And his kitchen has earned the two-Michelin-starred Mugaritz the third-best spot on the definitive San Pellegrino World’s Fifty Best restaurants list several years running, only two spots behind Noma.
Aduriz’s star continues to rise with the launch of a beautiful new cookbook, Mugaritz: The Natural Science of Cooking, published by Phaidon. The recipes therein are not the sort of things you’d actually make (“cucumber impregnated in ‘gazpacho’ water, frozen drops of goat’s cheese and requieni mint”; “lambs’ feet glazed in a salted toffee of lactose and fresh cream”). Rather, they’re an explanation, a big reveal, of the chemistry and creativity (and let’s not forget the philosophy) of Mugaritz’s kitchen. As Aduriz put it to me (via a translator) when I queried its practicality during an interview in a London hotel room: “People might watch a programme about skyscrapers. It doesn’t mean they will make them.” Or put another way: “In publishing the recipes we are showing what we do, rather than providing a user manual”. Aduriz also puts the book’s appeal down to something as non-practical as simple curiosity. You might want to make Jamie Oliver’s easy-peasy bruschetta, but you won’t be curious about doing so. Edible stones, silky bread stew and cocoa bubbles, on the other hand….
Aduriz does not look like a famous chef with a lofty philosophy. He is a sweet-looking man of medium-build, a bit like a kindly suburban dad, and wore one of those Scandinavian-style jumpers (not the cool type) in the interview. He was flushed when I was ushered into the room, wears specs, and has a soft voice. I liked him immediately, and all the more when I remembered the sort of trickery he gets up to in the kitchen – a chef of this sort could so easily be wearing black Armani and Prada glasses.
So what about that troublingly obscure philosophy? First I asked about the Mugaritz obsession with sense of place, and how food can communicate the essence of a particular spot. “In a dish you will find a representation of all the elements that tell you the identity of the place; all the different elements that comprise a human being’s experience,” says Aduriz.
Ok. But what does he mean by “all the elements”? Aduriz says, flushing further with excitement: “take a cup of tea – you could take a variety of approaches to it: sensory, nutritional, intellectual. Or you could approach it in a mental, intellectual, or cognitive way. There are scientific processes that are happening in the teacup. Ethical, cultural processes. Everything is happening in that cup of tea.”
Both of us are feeling the heat, but this is Aduriz’s grand theme and he gives it a grand, sweeping delivery: “Everything fits in the gesture of the act of eating. When we eat, we are projecting our past into the future, and our hopes.”
I think what really lies below the Mugaritz philosophy is a sense of fun; of play. It all adds up to challenging expectations and assumptions. Certainly, at the dinner Aduriz cooked after his day of interviews, I marvelled at how stone-like new potatoes could look; how botanical ice cream could be; how actually rock-hard soft-looking foccacia was. “You wonder if you are going to break your teeth, but when you eat you realise this question has been well resolved – scientifically. It’s surprising you with something you don’t know.”
Aduriz is unusual, for sure, and freely admits that he “lives in a bubble” and is frequently “surprised when people don’t see things the way I do.” But he’s still a man of his country. “The Spanish character has the capacity to abandon itself to experience. We’re very whole-hearted about what we do. And Spain is a creative environment; even when we’re going downhill financially, we’re creative about it.” That creativity is surely better directed to food and philosophy and, in that sense, there’s nobody more Spanish that Aduriz.
Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking by Andoni Luis Aduriz with a forward by Thomas Keller is out now (Phaidon, £35).