Arzak + Arzak

Arzak + Arzak is about a restaurant that has occupied the same building in San Sebastián since 1897 and has been run by the same family for four generations.

The house began as the wine cellar and inn of Juan Mari Arzak's grandparents. His parents turned it into a restaurant. He himself took over in his twenties after his father's death and did something nobody expected from a Basque family restaurant.

In the mid 1970s, he and a handful of fellow Basque chefs met the French nouvelle cuisine chefs and realised that the same freedom could be applied to their own cooking. The result was nueva cocina vasca, the movement that made Spanish cuisine something to be taken seriously internationally. It is worth stressing the order of events: Arzak came first, Adrià came later, and elBulli would not have been possible without the door that was opened here. The restaurant has held three Michelin stars continuously since 1989.

Elena Arzak is the fourth generation. She trained in Switzerland and worked with, among others, Adrià, Gagnaire and Le Gavroche before returning home, and today runs the kitchen together with her father. In 2012 she was named the world's best female chef. There is no other father and daughter kitchen operating at this level.

The book was published to mark the fortieth anniversary of the new Basque cuisine and is therefore as much a family history as a collection of recipes. It tells the story of the house, the city and the beginnings of a movement, alongside the most distinctive dishes from the previous decade and an insight into the flavour library of thousands of ingredients that the restaurant has built up.

For anyone who wants to understand where modern Spanish cooking really begins, this is the book. Not the most photogenic on the shelf, but the one with the longest thread running backwards.

Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 260
Authors: Juan Mari Arzak, Elena Arzak
Publisher: Grub Street
ISBN: 9781911621867
Language: English
First published: March 2020