Hi everyone, welcome to pot luck food talks. Today we're going to talk about... what does Mugaritz mean? It's like the oak in the frontier, something like that. Yeah, the oak on the border between Erenteria and Astigarraga. Exactly, because there is an oak tree. Is it oak? Correct? Yes. Yeah, there is an oak tree which is kind of the symbol of the restaurant. Well, Phil and I both had experiences in that place. We could make like a review, you know, like a good review.
The staff was really rude to us. The beds weren't properly accommodated. Three out of five stars, yeah. No, no, seriously, to be honest, I'm never going back. Nice views though, you know. Now, to be honest, for me it was the most relevant and interesting professional experience I had in restaurants. It really shaped my way of seeing things and I was very young when I went there. I was 18 or 19 years old.
But yeah, also for that reason, I think it really made like a super positive impact on me and I have really good memories about it. Yeah. When was the first time you heard about them? I think it was with you actually. I think when we were working together here in Berlin, I think you told me about them. And then I looked into them. There wasn't a lot of stuff on the internet, like on YouTube anyway, not as there is now, you know, we were flooded with content.
And I remember you talking to me about the work culture there and about the philosophy of the restaurant. And obviously, you know, then for me, it's their main cookbook, you know, the Spidey one with the stone iron cover made a big impact on me, you know. For me, it's like kind of like the time when you were there was from the outside view, the most interesting time for Mugurids.
Because it was just this very minimalistic philosophical cooking that was very, very closely tied to nature and the surroundings. Yeah, and they were really innovating techniques with things nobody had ever seen before. Yes. And that would happen regularly. You would see things that what the fuck is this like a macaron made out of animal blood? What is this, you know, those kind of things or or making a cooking watermelon in a way that looked like meat and making a carpaccio out of it.
This is kind of thing that are kind of like simple in execution. Not really, but really hard to get there conceptually, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And for me, at that time, it was like a very nice mixture of exactly that. It was like very innovative technique, but the technique was like, what's the word I'm looking for? Like underneath the surface, you know, it wasn't like in your face, you know, like so many other chefs did, like especially trying to copy Ferran and stuff like that, you know.
It's like technique in your face and here and this and they use this product and this product. Yeah, it was kind of like you had an end product that was closed in itself and it was a little bit of a mystery sometimes. There was a lot of mystique about the cooking and Mugarets, you know, where it was simple, you know, like fairly simple, fairly, you know, clean and minimalistic.
But the more you kind of peeled back the layers, the more you would find not just technique, but also thought behind it, you know, and a philosophical approach, maybe a reference to something, maybe a intention for you to experience something a certain way that's not obvious to the eye at first. And I think that's really what made Mugarets so interesting for me. It kind of drew you in. Yeah, I would poetic to the whole mixture of things and that's something that they claim themselves.
Also, like you see that more like in the older books. Well, I have lost track of it because also the whole style change. I mean, it's a restaurant that has been open like for the last 25 years or so. So there has been many different pucks. I remember actually you sending me an SMS with a picture of the Mugarets book saying, I'm going to Mugarets. That was the first time. So and what happened? This is actually like a nice anecdote to tell.
You send me that and I was like, OK, cool. So I sent a recommendation letter to Mugarets. Hey, this guy is super good and you should take him into consideration. He's going to apply and his CV and everything. And a few months later, they write me saying, hey, what the fuck is going on? Your friend. We accepted him and he hasn't answered. He's where is he? What's going on with him? And I write you, Phil, they're asking you to go to Mugarets and you haven't answered.
I remember that. I remember that. Yeah, it was it was I remember that moment because I actually I think I applied and they didn't answer me. And then like I think you like wrote them and their emails like landed in my spam. Yeah, but we met like in a bar and that night and I remember first thing you told me, dude, if this is a joke, I'm going to fucking smack you in the face. We got into the bar and I was like, no, but we have to figure it out.
So and then in front of me, you check your spam and it's a hot man. It was here in my spot. There are like five emails. And they told me I have one week to be there. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I was like, what the fuck? And you have to imagine at this time, I didn't have a computer. I didn't have a smartphone. You know, I was this poor. Like I didn't have anything.
And so to check my emails, I had to go to an Internet cafe to, you know, and it's like every now and again, I would go there like every couple of days. But like, you know, I like I never check my spam fold. Never ever. And I remember this like absolute like shock, you know, when I was like, oh my God, it's really it's really happening. It's really it's like it's really working out and I have to kind of make it work now, you know.
So I basically, yeah, just like I sold all my shit. I pulled all my furniture on the street. I helped you out with that. I remember. I packed my stuff and I and I just left. And, you know, in a really shitty way also, you know, like my I didn't get the deposit back from my apartment or anything. Like I tried to wrap everything up the best that I could. But I was like, fuck everything. And then one week, it's impossible. I was like, fuck everything.
You know, it's yeah. And that's it. Just up and left. Yeah, for me, it was not the same. But I also had like a crazy experience. I didn't know anything about Andoni or Mugaritz. And I was in my culinary school and I won like a, you know, like a draft, like a lotto, like something they were doing. I was walking by and I hear pick a number and I put a number. Oh, you won. And I was like, what is this? Like a conference with this Spanish chef.
And I was like, OK, cool. It was like an international culinary congress in Venezuela and Caracas. So there were some international speakers and Andoni was one of them, which also. Caused my attention because this was 2004. So Mugaritz was five years open back then. And Andoni was already traveling and talking about crazy technique and making videos and showing them an international conference, which is interesting.
So in this conference, I saw videos of there was Dani Lhasa foraging, taking her from the forest and doing these platings, which was the this was a chlorophyllia times. A complete different style from from today. And so for me, it was like interesting, but it was not that I fell in love with it at all. It was like, OK, cool. So I decided I had the goal of starting in a Michelin star restaurant in Spain. So I wrote to all the one Michelin star restaurants that back then were around 100.
I wrote a personalized email to each one of them and all of them answered like, oh, yeah, sure. Come around. Yeah, whatever. But Mugaritz, back then, Marchel was the restaurant manager and he answered like a mail with, you know, like an inventory of all the things I had to bring. And also like some psychological preparation advice to go there. And, you know, this really caught my attention. This really was like, oh, wow. You know, like these people are serious. Like, OK.
And it was the first place I went like after I left home. I left home, my home where I grew up and I went to the Mugaritz, the Stagiera house. It was also super crazy because you would get there with people already back then, people from all over the world. Australia, Japan, France, you know, from South Africa, California, you name it, you know, Mexico, Argentina, a lot of Argentinians.
And being in that environment, I think that was the most special thing, getting surrounded by people, so many diverse people. I'm talking about the Stagieres, but the chef de parties back then, they're all like very respected and recognized chefs all over the world with Michelin stars or 50 bests. And they were the chef de parties back then. So it was really like a super nice environment to be in. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was the same for me. Like it's such a surreal experience.
And then suddenly you're in an environment with, I mean, not all of them, but like, you know, suddenly you're surrounded by chefs. It's kind of like, oh, where do you come from? Yeah, I come from New York. I used to work at Le Bernardin per se and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, oh, wow.
Okay. Serious, serious professionals, you know, I mean, like you knew that you were there with some of the top guns, you know, of like internationally, you know, some of the like strongest upcoming chefs. Like you knew that you were in the same room with, you know, like, all right, like, you know, 10% of you guys are going to be Michelin star chefs. 100%, you know, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could easily tell for sure.
Yeah. If they, if they would, and that's what happened, you know, like Luca Fantin was in the meat and Danny Hunter was in the Garde Manger. Crazy. Alejandro Cancino was in the fish section, Jorenz was in production, you know, it was a lady was in the pastry. Danny Laza was there and also Javier Vergara, they were already back there doing R&D. Yeah. You know, it was crazy. It was crazy. How was your first week or your beginning in Mugaritz? Man, it was awful. It was fucking awful.
I remember you didn't like it at the beginning, you wrote me like, man, I hate this place. I want to leave and blah, blah, blah. Man, because it's fucking rough, you know, I mean, like, look, first of all, I arrived like a junkie from Berlin. First thing I did was just, you know, get over my drug withdrawal. That's why you were so angry. I hate this place. Yeah, also. But then again, like, I mean, don't get me wrong, the best country is beautiful.
But like, it's just a huge, it was a huge shock to my system. You're living in this house in the middle of the countryside, you know, you're in a room. There's no fucking furniture in it. It's just like tiles and bunk beds. You know, I mean, like when people watch the menu, you know, it's kind of like, yeah, it's, you know, it's kind of like, well, no, it's, it is kind of like that. You know, like, it just is a room with bunk beds in it.
And I mean, apart from the fact that I had no money whatsoever, you know, it was just minimal living, really minimal living. Beautiful nature, but like no privacy, full on, you know, just, yeah, just military life in a way, you know, you get picked up in the morning, you get driven to the restaurant, you work your fucking ass off. Like I think Antoni said, I don't think you can tell this, but like Antoni in his like initial speech, he was like, why is it that I work like a cheetah?
And it's like, don't think you can say that, man. A guy from Singapore next to me like, what did he say? To work like a cheetah, that's what he said. You ever saw this conference where, where Ferran Adria is next to Jose Andres? He's like a university in America. And he said, he's talking and Jose Andres is translating and blah, blah, blah, and Jose Andres translates. And then he says at some point, yeah, because we chefs, we work like, he says in Spanish, trabajamos como negros.
And Jose Andres translates, we chefs work really, really hard. Yeah, I mean, this is innate, innate old school racism that people don't think about, you know? Yeah, I mean, and it's not the same thing that in Spain than it is in America, for sure not. I mean, people say it without thinking about it, which doesn't make it okay. Exactly. But yeah, like my first week, and I remember like my first week, it was a big shock to my sister when I was really coming down hard.
And like, it was just like, and then you're out there on the side of a road picking primulas, you know? And it was just, I was very excited to be there. But wait a second, explain, explain what is being on the side of the road and picking primulas. What did you just say? So the first thing that I did for Mugarit is, this was before the restaurant opened for the season, right? So I'm sure it's probably still the same.
But when I arrived, the restaurant was closed for Imas Dain for the research and development period. And we arrived and we had, as soon as everybody had arrived, we had like a few weeks to get ready for people to come to the restaurant and eat. And so the weeks before that, one of the first, because I was one of the first people to arrive, one of the first jobs we did is pick primulas, which are a sort of flower that is very significant of springtime.
Basically wild foraging. That's what you were doing. Yes, wild foraging. What we were doing is we were picking these flowers that were very evocative of spring to preserve them in powdered lactose so that we could serve them in autumn. Ah, okay. But that's what I was doing. But I was just very overwhelmed. You know, it's like, for me, the Basque Country still is very magical. You know, it's like even today when I go there, I'm just drawn in by the magic of like the countryside and the land.
And like, I don't know, it's a mixture, I think, of Mugarets and reading like one of my favorite books when I was a teenager, Shibumi. I don't know if you know it. No. It's a very interesting book. And in the later part of the book, he basically escapes to the Basque Country and hides in the mountains in the Basque Country. Oh, nice. And he, in Echebari actually.
Okay. And it just has this like mystique because nobody could find him because he was speaking Basque to the locals and they were hiding him in like mountain caves like Etta style, you know. That's very unrealistic. Like a foreigner learning to speak Basque, you know. Yeah, well, he learned it when he was in prison. So, you know, I should read it. It's a good book. Shibumi. It sounds good. Sounds exciting. Yeah. How was your first week?
Yeah, I remember arriving. I remember like everything. Like when Marchel picked me up in the train station, when I arrived to the house, which was on the second floor of Mugarets. And, you know, there were all these chef whites hanging from the laundry. I arrived and there are like, I don't know, 30 chef jackets hanging.
I'm like, okay, this is going to be my new room. And they were still in service. So I was alone in the home, in the house. And then suddenly 20 guys walking like, oh, what did you have? And they had like, oh, you know, they would take like a big piece of chorizo out of their jackets or bread or things. There was like this Stagier banquet and someone took a bottle of wine and it was, you know, like very like everybody drinking and eating and talking.
Yeah, that was the beginning of it. My first week was also in the garden, like foraging and gardening. And back then we had the Gargi U. So we did that. I did that like for at least three weeks, only gardening, picking herbs, choosing them. And I think it was good to start with that. Also, like kind of like our direct supervisor was kind of, Joannes, who was a production chef, but also Paco Morales, who's now a three star chef. He was a chef de cuisine. So he was running the place back then.
Oh, wow. Yeah. And so he was really on top of us, you know, really pushing us and being behind everything and not accepting a minimal mistake. I have to say, my impression is that they were really strict and, you know, disciplined. But in difference from other places that also had like this tendency is that they would never disrespect the person, at least in my experience. I never saw someone, you know, getting personal into someone or it was always about delivering high quality.
And this is something I really learned from them, like how to be, you know, can be rough if it needs to. And you can push and you but you don't need to go personal with anyone. You don't have to write to, you know, like, what do you? And this is something a lot of people just don't understand. Yeah, that's true. Although I have to say that the way that I was pushed, you know, it was like it was pretty unnecessary.
Like in a way where not that, you know, I can I can be pro pushing somebody to deliver their best. But I was definitely I was used to getting pushed. Like I was coming out of, you know, like a mission, start kitchens also, and I was used to pressure and not against it. I wasn't like, oh, my God, you know, what was Sky doing? I got it. Like, I understood it. I was like, OK, that's pressure because we want to deliver. We want to achieve.
But I remember, for example, I mentioned this like this time when we were setting up before we even took guests in. Right. So how it worked is like we all when I was there, we all walked into the restaurant, the kitchen. We got like a little tour. Then we cleaned the entire restaurant. And then the next day was kind of OK. So today you've got to clean. Tomorrow I'm going to start the prep, basically.
And everybody got divided into sections. I was pastry to start because I had the least famous CV, I guess. And they handed you like a bunch of recipes and said, OK, these are your dishes now. You're going to start cooking them, going to start preparing them. And you're going to be responsible for them. It's only going to be you doing this. And you get going and you start doing the prep and get into the restaurant rhythm. And then you start doing mock services. Right.
And so in the beginning, I was in shit every day, you know, because like you try to find your way. You're trying to do these like recipes with like strange techniques that you've never done before, making kuzu, meringues and whatever. You try to like figure it out. You know, well, somebody's like pushing you. Wow, come on, come on, come on, come on. I stuff, I stuff, I stuff, I stuff.
But then I got to a point where, you know, we start doing these mock services and I start I remember like really like getting to a point where for the first time I was ready with all my shit right before we break for cleaning. And I was like, oh, great. You know, and I stop and I kind of like start organizing and I slow down a little bit and straight away. So like the head chef comes to me and she's like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you fucking slowing down?
And I'm like, isn't this like, isn't this great? Like, isn't this good that I finished my shit? You know, like it's not like I'm taking a fucking break. You know, I'm just slowing down a little bit and make sure everything's nice. Everything's organized in my fridge, etc. You know, making sure that my thing is clean. And it was a lot of like running for running sake. But that's less problem of the restaurant.
It was a lot of problems. The head chef that was there when I was there, who was who wasn't a good manager, in my opinion. Yeah, I also like some experiences with some chefs that weren't specifically good. There was one that was like a legendary, infamous chef who was supposed to be the successor of Paco Morales. He was there for three months and then he got fired. Imagine like you're getting hired to be the head chef of Mugarich and you get fired.
He really messed up. He was, you know, and he was really stupid and he didn't got it, you know, like he didn't understood the philosophy of the place. Another thing that I learned in Mugarich that for me was really valuable. And it's something that I later learned that this is directly El Buye School and that all the restaurants of.
Yeah, this is also important to explain that like Andoni was in El Buye and Martin Vera Sategui and kind of those are kind of like his influences as a chef and a manager. His mentors. The differences that Martin Vera Sategui is like, I have very exactly the opposite, like a place that can be mean just for the sake of being mean, while El Buye is more like Mugarich, like a place where they push you. But, you know, like there is a reason for it. And this is a place that both things got combined.
So, but what I'm going to do is that the prep table, the production station, that's something where you have like a long table and everybody stands in front of each other that you work like in couples, and you have like, of course, this is something you can do if you have like large teams.
And everybody does the same. So if you need to peel potatoes, there is 25 kilos of potatoes, you got 10 people peeling potatoes, and the whole thing is done in 10 minutes, instead of having one person for one hour, right. And for me that's something really cool and that's something like many restaurants don't do. I know Nomad does this because it's also, it also comes from El Buye, but most restaurants don't work like this.
And I think it's really efficient because at the end of the day, if you put all the combined hours together, first of all, more is achieved. And second, you know, like, you can do more difficult things because you're working in team. And if there is like a super precision prep that you need to do, it's not the same doing that alone.
Instead of being surrounded by six other people doing the same and teaching you how to do it, how to precisely hold your hand and your knife to do like a specific cut or technique or this kind of thing. So it was for me being super young and being in the production station, also Jorenz was the head of that station.
And I think he really had like a positive impact on me in that period. And at the end of the day, I was already running that station, you know, Jorenz would take care of other things and I would take care of, I don't know, the 12 new staggers. And I would tell them, okay, now we're doing this, now we're doing that and running the thing. And that was super cool as well.
Yeah, yeah. I really like doing production also. And it's like you say, you know, it's more efficient, it's more enjoyable also. And like, also, I feel like, you know, like I personally, I was always like that, that I wanted to, like, if we were, you know, Frenching lamb, I always wanted to do it better than everybody else, you know, faster, cleaner, just better, you know, so everybody pushes each other, you know.
Yeah. I remember I used to have competitions with Santiago Lászlá, who could like, I was suckling pig, yeah, suckling pig, who could clean the suckling pig the fastest or who could chop the casein de ajo the fastest, you know.
Well, that's a, that's a crazy technique, for example, like cutting garlic or cutting parsley and mugari. It's, I've never seen something like that nowhere else. You cut with a knife the parsley until it, and then you take, it already looks like a puree, but you would take just a pinch and throw it in water to see how small the particles of parsley are. And you want it to be them as small as dots, you know. Yeah. I do, I do that in my current restaurant actually. Yeah, that's super cool.
I make people do it. Because it looks so nice, you know. It's like a technique, you have to cut the parsley, you can't chop it, you have to cut it, you have to make sure it stays dry, like move it from one side to the other. Yeah. It's like, it makes such a difference, you know, for example, even classic cooking, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. Like some, at the mall, we have these like glazed, like small potatoes, you know, they're cooked, peeled, like turned, so they're like nice and round. And then they're just glazed and like a really simple butter and water emulsion. And then you throw a pinch of this fine parsley, it gets like, like this is super classic, you know, potatoes with butter and parsley, you know. But it just coats the potato in these like specks, it looks very special, and it's really, really nice.
Yeah, I remember the dish we had back then, it was similar, it was small potatoes, but they were cooked and dehydrated, then rehydrated like in a stock. And then it was glazed, and the glaze had like truffles and this super small parsley. And this was served with a tendon, like a cow tendon. Sounds super delicious. Yeah, and this like whole like production thing, it's kind of like, you know, I worked with, I still have some, you know, really good friends from my time in Mugarritz.
For me, that is the most valuable thing that I took away from being in Mugarritz, is the people that I met and the connections that I made. Of course, I learned a lot, but really the connections that I made are the most valuable thing. And I'm still in contact with a lot of the people from there, you know. But I've also, surprisingly, worked with the biggest fucking idiots that I've ever worked with. Anyway, it's higher career.
You know, the stuff that I've seen there, you know, it was like for me, I don't know how it was for you, I think for you it must have been very different. But for me, it was like, the group of chefs that I was working with was really, really clearly divided. There was no real room in the middle. It was international top guns, you know, just fucking slayers, real absolute badass chefs that were just dedicated and focused and skillful and knowledgeable.
And there was the other part, which were primarily Spanish kids that were basically just, you know, out of their parents' house with zero fucking idea what the fuck was going on. The worst attitude you could imagine, like not to a large extent, you know, and seemingly set out to do the dumbest shit possible.
Like, I mean, I've seen, you know, you remember these like, I don't know if you guys had them probably because they were still very old when I used them. So probably you guys used them, these like 20 liter pressure cookers. No, no, no, no, these were probably post fire. You were in the post fire era. I was in the post fire area, yes, in the post fire area. We have the nice kitchen there, the post, we had the fire money kitchen.
Anyway, so there were these like, these like huge pressure cookers that we used to cook different things in like, like tendon or like brisket, you know, and I saw these things explode not once, but twice by the same guy. You just like leave them on an induction on full blast on power, the thing going, just going off, you know, I mean, this fucking thing has an inbuilt alarm system that tells you something is going wrong.
I'm alarm, alarm, please do something, you know, and yeah, just didn't give a shit. And I mean, super, super dangerous, super life threatening, the same guy actually also twice on the first day, we were cleaning, deep cleaning the kitchen. He climbed on top of the cooking counter and cleaning the extraction.
And he starts walking on top of the induction. And there's an induction that's like, you know, a meter 50 long easily, you know, it's a big expensive induction. He just stands on it, the thing collapses. Little do you know, two weeks later, he does the same exact thing. The thing gets exchanged, he does exactly the same thing. The screen's down, starts walking over. He broke it again. No way. He broke it again. He did exactly the same thing.
And like, meanwhile, I was getting treated like absolute shit by the by the head chef. And I was like, man, what about this guy? This guy, I'm here pushing. I think he just tried to fucking make this restaurant run. You know, I'm just, I'm just trying to take care of my section. Meanwhile, this guy, why is he here? I don't know.
There was like a similar one. I have to say, like in my case, most were like you say, up guns from all over the world. But there was this one. I remember it. You know, the grits you use for for the oven, right? But there are also some that are like plastic and you use this like for dishwashing or a dishwasher machine that we had back then.
Or for draining things or something. Yeah, exactly. He used them, but they look exactly the same. Just one is plastic. The other one is metal. A very important difference. Especially if you were going to bake bread, you know. So are you seeing the picture? Like baked bread with melted plastic. Wonderful. Yeah. Oh man. And that same guy, like this was Luca Fantin, who is now a top chef in Tokyo. He was running the meat section and he has this guy to drain the lamb trotters, which was in a dish.
And he's trying the whole thing and comes with the water and he threw all the trotters to the garbage. And of course Luca went mental and he was like, what do I do? And he said, give me a pistol. Give me a pistol. Give me a fucking gun. That's really funny. We should make a second episode on Mugaritz. I think that this was like a good first one. Yeah, there's too much to tell. There's too much to tell. Yeah, and many angles to take it on. So let's leave it here. I'm looking forward to it.
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.