Hi, everyone. Welcome to Pot Luck Food Talks. Eric, before we start, please, you have to tell me, where did you get this hat? My hat? It looks amazing. That is a very natural question. Yes. I've been wondering this entire time. The entire time Alexander's been setting up the mics, I've been looking at you in wonder. asking myself, where can I get a hat like that? Well, I got it on my recent trip to Japan. And so the second day I arrived at Japan, we went to Shimokitazawa.
Have you been there? No. So it is like neighborhood, like a super nice neighborhood you should go. And there are a lot of like vintage stores. Also, the neighborhood is pretty nice in itself. So we went there for a walk and to visit my friend Barry, who lives there. He cooked lunch for us, like an amazing, I would define very like a semi -professional home cook. You know, he has like a sous vide device. He has like this super pro Japanese cast iron pot rice cooker. Oh, nice.
It was like a tuna wrapped in kombu and sake, you know, like super nice. If it was lunch, I would define it as a Japanese breakfast with boiled rice and poached eggs. and the sashimi and all this sort of stuff. Anyways, after lunch, we went walking around in the neighborhood, and he brought us to this vintage store where I saw this cap. And I saw it, and it was like, oh, this looks pretty cool, you know? So I scanned the letter, the kanji that has, and Google Translate
translated as soup. So it said soup, and I was like, man, soup. It's amazing, yeah. For good or bad, when I'm traveling, I avoid consumerism like overly, you know, especially in Japan. I mean, I had to buy an extra luggage, which is what a lot of people have to do when they go to Japan for the first time. In my case, it's because I broke the small one. So I had to buy
a new one. So I bought like a huge one. And even though I had overweight, you know, because it's so, I mean, buying, for example, ceramics in Kyoto, that shit is like crack cocaine, man. You never have enough of it. Tokyo was my departure point and I would also leave Japan from Tokyo. So I traveled around and went back to Tokyo when I was for the second time in Tokyo. So I had just like two days left. I was like, the cap, the soup cap. I have to go back to that vintage
store. So I went back there. I was determined to buy it, you know, because... it was not cheap also not expensive like 40 euros you know like and i was like okay let's let's get it it doesn't matter so i go back i scan it again with google translate and it says hot water and i'm like no i'm not saying ah this is not as cool as soup but i love it anyway you know Because, you know, kanjis are not letters as we understand them. They're not like pieces of sounds that you build
together. They're like concepts, right? So hot water and soup is kind of like... Same concept, yeah. Exactly. So I was like, okay, let's take it. So I go to the counter and the two ladies there, they were like, you know, like Japanese laughs. And I was like, okay, well, what does it say? And they said, ah! I don't know. So I take my Google Translate so I could record them and translate. And I look at it and it said, public bath. And I was like, ah, you know, same
concept, hot water, you know. It was this, I'll take it. Referring to a public bath as a soup is really cursed. It's a really cursed idea. Yeah, and that's the story of it. Then I saw that there are some YouTube channels where they show people that have ridiculous stuff written in kanjis. And they don't know tattoos or t -shirts or stuff like that. Yeah, that's all about it. That's nice. I'd rock a hat saying I owe one of those. Soup or public bath. I'd be fine with
that, honestly. So here we are. What's happening?
Well, I wanted to prove you that... um everything you eat in san sebastian is at least good yeah i mean i think that's wrong like okay like it's not it depends how you define good right i'm sure there's places where it's easier to eat something that's really inedible but there are like a fair few places that i've been to to get like a and it's like like it's edible but it's not great you know like it's really not great no no i didn't say great i said at least good
you know yeah please okay meaning good that's not bad you know like or a little bit more than not bad you know i mean i suppose for example barcelona i've always said that barcelona can be the city where you have like the best restaurants maybe in the world or in spain madrid san sebastian barcelona But the difference is that in Barcelona, you also find the worst places in the world. You know, like, you can get, like, crappy tourist traps with unedible junk for a lot of money and
easy, like, super easy. Walk into a random place in El Raval, sorry, not El Raval, in Las Ramblas, and you'll find that, you know? Walk to a random place in San Sebastian, in City Center, Old Town, or Gross, and you'll have at least good... Or it could be super good, excellent, and mind -blowing. So you could find that, you know? Okay, fair
enough. Alexander was telling me yesterday about this thing that I think you guys spoke about, that apparently Basque people think that this whole hype about Basque food is like a sort of political thing that's not actually that good. I mean, of course, that's not like a general view. But I've known people, I've talked to people, like friends that are... In some cases, not even
from San Sebastian, from villages around. And because they know that I work at Basque Culinary Center and I have this whole background with food and everything, they asked me, like, this whole thing about San Sebastian being a food capital, is that true? Like, is Arzak really someone worldwide? And I'm like, yes, he is. Yeah, he's like a legend, like a living legend, you know? It's not like some hype that was built around him for locals. That's what they're asking
me, you know? And I say, oh, yeah, yeah. Like, I went to Chefsaff in Düsseldorf, this chef conference in Düsseldorf in Germany. Elena was speaking, and they showed a picture of the old man, of von Maria Sack. And there was like a two -minute standing ovation, you know, for just showing a picture of the man in Germany. So that really
proves that he is a legend. But going back to this topic, for example, there's this new building from Basque Culinary Center that is being built, and there's a lot of opposition from the neighbors. But that's also something very common if you go back in the history of this city. Grumpiness and opposition. Yeah. For example, I don't know if you know, but the whole beach of Gross, Suriola
Beach, that's an artificial beach. Like if you see pictures from the mid -90s, there was like a wall in the middle of the beach and there was no beach as we understand it today. There was no Cursal. There was no... Many of these things were built just in the late 90s. And now you have that beautiful beach where everybody was around and everybody enjoys it. There was a lot of opposition to that building. A lot of people didn't want it to be built, thought it was a
mistake and so on. So with this new building, they're saying like, oh, this is like, how much to gastronomy? We've had enough of it. Where are our dogs going to pee now? You know, like, I'm serious. That's crazy. Or so they had to cut like two trees to make the building. And it was like, what's going to happen with our biodiversity? Of course. There's so little biodiversity
in the Basque Country. And I mean, of course, I respect everybody, especially people, especially locals that grew up here and they have their own vision. I know very few people outside of Basque Culinary Center that are enthusiastic about it now that it's still a project. In any case, what I want to prove is that there's this whole thing about it has been enough with this food thing, you know, like I've seen. At the same time, people are not seeing the value of
it because they take it for granted. Good food is taken for granted around here because of that reason. Because it's good, because you've always known. If you grow up here, you've known good food as a standard. So something a little less than good is crap. It's unedible crap. So the standards are very high here around food. Yet at the same time, I think there's a generational
shift problem. Young Basque, it's not as it was in the 90s or the 2000s where there was a large amount of young people becoming hospitality and astronomy professionals. Now that's not the case anymore. So what happens? That slot has been taken by foreigners, mostly Latin Americans. So you get to see here most or a lot. of traditional Basque restaurants are run by Latin Americans who preserve the tradition, of course. They're cooking in the traditional style. But yeah, it's
a quite common thing. But also, interestingly enough, in many places, well, not in many places, you will see a lot of traffic of Japanese travelers. And that's brilliant. They even have their own city guide in Japanese. And they walk into places with their guide, for example, to Casa Urola with the scallop, just showing the picture of the scallop. I bet they love that at Casa Urola, yeah. Yeah, because I didn't know this. There is like a... It's not the official name, but
people call it the Food Disneyland. It's a theme park in Japan where they have replicas of restaurants from all over the world, and they have a replica of Casa Urola. No way. Yeah, so they're coming to the original place. Crazy. That's so Japanese, you know? Yeah, that's super Japanese. But I think what's interesting is obviously the Basque Country is a very rich region in Spain. It's very rich in resources, etc. Apart from the fact that it's a shame that people don't see the value
in food because it's a huge tourism draw. It brings a lot of money to the country also. People can hate on tourists as much as they want, but it brings a lot of capital and keeps the standard of life up. But what's interesting is now being here in the Basque Country and wanting to look at real high -level Basque cooking and what that means. It's sort of like what makes the cuisine so interesting to people and so fascinating.
Because I know when I first came to the Basque Country, I didn't really know what to expect. I came here for Mugaritz, to work specifically
at Mugaritz. And being here in the Basque Country for that year... really changed my trajectory as a chef i was like heading one way and then i came here and i went to asadores and sidrerias and stuff like that and it really changed where i was heading for me like two things that made me fell in love with the city back then when i also went to mucaris i was 19 years old And it was both cider houses and pincho bars. You know, like this pincho bar crawling. I was like,
this is fucking Disneyland. You know, this is food Disneyland. And a cider house is also such an amazing experience. It's a magical thing. I mean, you have like way more knowledge about the Basque country. Now you've lived here a couple of times and you've come for visits and everything. So what is for you Basque cooking about? Like what are the key features of it? For me, it's like super, super focused on the produce, on the product with like minimal kind of like intervention.
It's like very puristic and often with the element is very seasonal and often with the element of
charcoal and fire. grill like very subtly and it has this like very it gives it this like almost primal sort of like mystical feel to it like take like so this example you have like guisantes lagrima they're like teardrop peas it's a super seasonal super high quality product cooked over charcoal gives it like this like little they're now in season by the way yeah we're going to get those probably on sunday i i hope so man they're fucking insane like it's um absolutely
incredible because the best countries like we were talking about yesterday it's like a it's like garden of eden almost it's like fucking paradise like the stuff they have here the mixture of like sea and land is unparalleled and then this approach of kind of like very minimal cooking preserving the essence the natural essence you know it's it's the it's like the holy trinity of cooking The story of how it developed, as I understand it, I need to research more and
learn more, but things that I know. If I go back the earliest I can, I once met a guy. He told me, oh, my grandfather was a food critic. And I said, ah, from the new Basque cuisine generation. And he was like, no, earlier. And I was like, oh, really? So this guy sent me pictures of one of the food guides that his grandfather wrote. And this was so interesting because there were like, you know, like a food guide where you can eat this there and that over there from the 60s,
you know. And there were things like, there's a very good mushroom soup at the drugstore in Old Town. So there was already a culture of going around from one place to another and knowing that there is someone who does something really good over there. So there was already like a very, very strong food culture. We already talked about Nouvelle Cuisine in the Nouvelle Cuisine
episode. Back then, also, you had this culture in bars, but if you went to a white tablecloth restaurant, like a proper high -end fine dining restaurant, it was 100 % French. All of the restaurants were French here, with French fancy names and these kind of things. So what happened after... Franco died in the mid -70s. There was this renaissance of it was okay to feel Basque again. It was okay to feel Catalan again. This was a period known in the arts as the destape, which means taking
the lid out. So in the cinema, Almodovar, all of these kind of things happened. There was like this zeitgeist, you know? And in that context, a group of 14 chefs, even though that Anthony Bourdain in his episode, he calls them the 12 original apostles. There were 14, not 12, but it's cooler to call them the 12 apostles. We'll forgive them. And they wrote a manifesto. A manifesto that inspired the new Nordic manifesto and many
other things. But this was way too early. This was like mid -70s and they were determining to... Basically, the manifestos said, let's not be French. Let's be Basque and celebrate. Or like that mushroom soup from the drugstore, let's transform it into something that we can put into an amazing high -end restaurant and the proper setting for it. You know, which was the main difference between the history that happened here and what happened in Copenhagen. In Copenhagen,
they had sausages and potatoes. That's what they had. So they couldn't, it was very difficult to elevate that. So they just opened the canvas to a wine canvas and just explore. out of scratch and create like a new cuisine out of scratch. In this case, it was creating a new cuisine out
of grandmothers and tradition, right? And that's amazing because many of these high -end restaurants, they develop dishes that became standards that now you see also in pincho bars that people cook at home and the wheel goes on and on and on. Like people here, they cook Basque cooking at home. They go to Basque restaurants for restaurants and they also have this. gastronomic societies, these supper clubs where they go there and cook Basque food, you know? Which is incredible. Yeah.
It's very, very different from, let's say, for example, America, the United States, for example. They're becoming a chef means pretty much understanding external traditions. Like, let's learn how the French or the Italians or the Spanish or the
Japanese cook. Yeah. While here, people are pretty much... of course they know they learn about everything but it's pretty much alive this statement of think global act local yeah for sure like it makes absolute sense right you have this it's really really cool one it's it's such a brave sort of like movement also you know of kind of like reconquering and reabsorbing your own culture that was like for such a long time Forbidden and pushed away from you, you know, and I mean
if you look at it If you look at that and you look at it now, you know where past has been taught in school, you know and stuff like that It's it's crazy. What a huge push over like what two three generations they've done, you know, and how what an effect that had Okay, nice that you bring that up But it because I'm sure a lot of our people in the audience don't even know about what the bus country is You know like so like first of all Basque language is the oldest
spoken language in Europe. It predates Latin, you know, like... Which is insane. That means that, like, logically it has no Latin roots, but no trackable roots from any other language, no Indo -European, Germanic, whatever, you name it, it's not that. So there is no conclusive theory about where it originated. But it's believed to have originated somewhere between 5 ,000 and 15 ,000 years ago. So that means Basque people predate Romans. They have been here for a while.
And that's also probably the reason. So it's a culture of, I would say, shepherds and sailors, right? And so that's like the melting pot that created... the cuisine that exists here. No, but the interesting thing is, and you can really see the aftermath. There is also a French part. So as I said, Basque predate the Romans. So they've been here in the region and then something called Spain was created and something called France was created and the Basque country stayed in
the middle. So that means that there is like a part of the Basque country, what is known as
Euskal Herria, which is a Basque territory. that is part of France and if you go there they speak Basque with French accent and there are very clear similarities in the architecture and the type fonts and a lot of things but the food is very different and I'm pretty sure that the food became very different after or more different than it already was after the new Basque cuisine where they said like Let's use olive oil instead
of butter. Instead of looking how to do a blah, blah, blah, let's look in other regions of Spain how to, I don't know, incorporate like a gazpacho or even like the tomato salad. That is something that has become a standard in summer. It's like one of the iconic things that you will find in San Sebastian. That's something relatively modern. You know, like it's something that like in the 80s, you would only find tomato cooked into sauces
in the dishes around here. Now, this is something that was incorporated probably from the south of Spain or from Spaniards that came here and opened their restaurants. There's an article about this, Talk to the Walla at Barnestor, where he says raw tomatoes, that was something from the Spaniards. Because that's also something people here, they don't feel Spanish. They feel
Basque. Yeah. It is a big difference. I mean, you know, like from people to the outside, it's easy to kind of like put it all in one thing. But if you're in Spain, there's a very noticeable difference between Basque people and Spanish people. You know, not just in the attitude, but just in the entire culture, in the physical appearance, like in everything. It's just a different type of people. Yeah, absolutely. We're going to go to a lot of reference places that showcase this
exact cooking. in different styles. We're going to go to some traditional places that are at the very, very top of the culinary level here and to a couple of places that are sort of like a modern interpretation of that cooking. So it should be really interesting. Yeah, but I think it's transversal to all of them, the features that you mentioned. They're very produce -driven.
There's grill, I think, in all of them. Yeah, we're going to especially learn about... how the fish breeding culture developed around here, because I think you get the best grilled fish in the world, in the Basque country. And the way it's done is something that developed, well, let's ask tomorrow to Mikel. As far as I know, there are two schools. One is the school of Orio, which is where we're going. And the other is a school of Getaria, which is an ex -village.
And the main difference is that in Orio, they would throw the fish. directly to the grill. And in Orio, they would put it in the las bazugueras, in these cages where you put the fish inside so you can flip it. Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. And I actually talked to Aitor Arregui from Elcano, and he told me he did a research to try to discover when these cages originated, and there was no conclusion. They couldn't find any reference.
They don't know who or where it started. Yeah, because I mean, those cages also, they're so iconic nowadays, you know, like so many elements of the best cooking have become worldwide culture. The grilling cages, you know, they're used everywhere now, even in, you know, Japan. Yesterday, I saw a video of one of my old head chefs who's opened a restaurant in L .A. And he was like showing the grill cages like in his restaurant in L .A., you know, to like the cheesecake, the best cheesecake,
you know, that's now a worldwide sensation. It's so cool how this like it is something about this cuisine that's just it's like it's almost like it's like the perfect type of cooking. And then elements just become extremely popular and get adapted worldwide. You go to Barcelona and you will see grilled fish a la Donostiara. Donostia style. Donostia is the Basque word for San Sebastian.
So right now we're going to Casa Cámara, which is this place where they have a huge lobster cage in the middle of the dining room where they literally get lobsters directly fresh from the sea to your table. Like a medieval torture device. Exactly. This restaurant is over 140 years old. That's crazy. 1884. There's pictures of that lobster cage from ages ago. Yeah, because it used to be a place where people would go to buy lobster before it became a restaurant. Yeah,
it would make sense. Make the restaurant around the cage where you get the lobster. Then we went to Muca, which is like a modern Basque grill place from Juan Vargas, who you work with at Mugares. At some point he was head chef at Mugares. When I went for dinner in 2016, he was. Yeah, he was there for a long time. He was like a remnant of what I thought was like the strongest team in Mugarets. He's very Spanish in his approach with a very deep appreciation for the Basque.
And he's like super minimalist, produce -focused. It's super interesting. Very interesting. Very authentically niche. I've been to Muga before this. The interesting thing about it is that... They embrace the Basque grill culture, but they're very, very, very vegetable -driven, which is very interesting for a grill place. You know, he worked at Michel Bras. At Juan Vargas? For a short time. Ah, okay. Well, and Mugare is also very vegetable -driven. Yes. Or at least it used
to be. Now it became more this techno -emotional kind of approach. That's today. Tomorrow, we're going to... Bodegón Xochimari, which is a place where Basque chefs go when they want to eat grilled fish. It's a place to go. It's also a historical place. They developed many of the ways, the grill styles. That's for lunch. For dinner, we're going to go to Asador Bedua, which is like three villages further to the west. Again, very traditional and very vegetable -driven for a grill place.
Asadoras, you know, means a grill house. That will be Saturday. Sunday, we're going to visit Jade Gross in La Rioja. Nice. Again, another ex -head chef at Mugaritz. She started producing her own wines. in La Rioja, and I'm pretty excited about that. I don't know where we're going for lunch. I know she booked something. And for dinner, we come back to San Sebastian and we go to Narro. Again, modern Basque, ex -Mugaritz chefs, lots
of respect for grilling, vegetable -driven. I don't know where we're going to have the guisantes, the lagrimas, the baby peas. I think that could be a good place for it. Probably. Maybe Asador Bedua could be a good place for it as well. Maybe Mucha as well. Maybe all of them. Maybe all of them, yeah. No, let's avoid repeating. Let's try to do it as diverse as possible. 100%, yeah. Because there's things to be had in each place. I mean, you can have steak in all of the places
I mentioned. You can if you want to. We should have a steak at least once. Yeah. At least once. At least once. Agree. Yeah. That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks. If you like what we're doing, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok as Potluck Food Talks. The show airs every Monday.