Mugaritz

Mugaritz is a key player in the gastronomic cluster that is the Spanish Basque Country. It now comes in at number 3 in the San Pellegrino list of the World’s Top 50 Restaurants, higher than its competitor Arzak (number 8). It’s too long since we went to Arzak to make a fair comparison, but it did seem to us that Alinea (in Chicago, number 6) offered a significantly more interesting and more successful expression of molecular gastronomy. Some dishes at Mugaritz were fascinating, but some did seem a little forced and even a little pointless.

The first little dish is a delicate surprise, “An envelope of flowers”, says the tasting menu; a transparent “plastic” bag, filled with flowers, dissolves instantly as we eat it, leaving a light caramel taste not heavy enough to intrude on our enjoyment of the flowers. One of them tastes like lemon verbena.

Now the famous “edible stone”, or clay potato; what appears to be a stone in a bowl of volcanic sand. The stone is in fact a potato covered in an ashy substance, and the sand, while edible (if tasteless), apparently isn’t meant to be eaten, since there’s far too much of it. The raison d'être of this dish is, apparently, the visual incongruity of eating a stone; I don’t find it particularly interesting as food, a bit like Heston’s “sound of the sea” dish.

The “focaccia” looks like a folded napkin covered with dirty smudges of black olive sauce. It arrives hot, popping and cracking before we get to it. It snaps in our hands like thin clay – N1 says it’s like carta da musica - and it tastes more like a poppadom than a focaccia.

One of the loveliest dishes is the apparently unassuming piscolabis (snack), two small pieces of tuna with pepper and tiny cucumbers. There’s a fruit element too that we never quite put our finger on, but the combination of fruit and fish is unexpectedly delicious. This is what I want – new taste sensations.

The next dish is “fake saffron rice”, a creamy cheesy risotto with zucchini seeds. I don’t quite know what’s “fake” about the saffron, but it’s delicious, anyway.

Now, an interactive dish. To begin with, we are invited to thoroughly grind linseed, toasted sesame and pink peppercorns in a mortar. Then the waiting staff add herbs – including mint and shiso, a leaf, I have noticed, much beloved of restaurants in this category – and pour on a stocky fish soup. It’s fine, but I rather fail to see the point, or rather, I suspect that the point was to make us feel that we were participating. Otherwise, it was a heavily-spiced fish soup.

Then comes a dish of tiny brown tomatoes that have spent a little time in the oven with garlic, all served with some basil. No doubt the point here is to make us enjoy a lovely local ingredient, but the garlic rather overwhelms any subtlety of flavour the tomato might have.

The next dish looks like a bird’s nest with flowers woven through. The “twigs” making up the nest are strands of meat fibre possibly frozen or flash cooked, and we are invited to guess what kind of meat they are. Somewhere in the dish, onion has been added, or the meat has been cooked with an oniony stock. Lovely, anyway; the meat turns out to be filaments of beef tongue.

Bread had not hitherto come with the meal; but now we are offered a kuzu bread (from kudzu, a creeper with starchy roots) as part of the next dish. Bread, though? It looks like a goats’ cheese, round and white. It is soft, gluey and bland, and very filling; we are advised we might like to eat only what we need to go with the artichoke and bone marrow it is served with. It is the bread that dominates the dish, though. We decline to finish it, knowing there are a lot more dishes to come, but I notice that at another table, a hearty young local on a special night out gets through a whole one and moves on to another.

The next dish of pork noodles in a fish sauce is something I’d expect in one of the more authentic sorts of Chinese restaurant. The next dish again goes down the “bland-meets-weird” route; it is described as “cheese” and looks like another small goats’ cheese, but is nothing of the sort. Cutting into it, we find a rather tasteless beige mixture with the texture of uncooked dough. We eventually get out of the waiter that it is cow’s milk boiled with flax seed. “Weird rather than good,” says N1. Probably not one we’ll be trying to replicate at home.

Ventresca paired with pepper is a simple, classic combination, quite palate-refreshing after some of the oddities.

“Textures of coastal fish” really means a selection of the different bits of bream, quite a savoury dish; some of the fish is crisped, fried quite heavy, really calling for red and not white wine. Which in fact makes it a quite natural bridge to the first meat course: “Beef with a steak emulsion and salt crystals”, small pieces of steak with a creamy butter made from the fat, like eating lardo, says N1, or beef dripping.

The next dish is utterly fabulous; “pork tails, crispy leaves and toasted millet oil”. The “crispy leaves” are a cereal simulation of oak leaves, and taste rather like Special K, but the pork tails themselves are a joy; dry and crispy on one side, sweet, fatty and gelatinous on the other.

No topping that in main courses, so we are moved on to dessert. Chamomile ice cream is absolutely lovely, although we feel it is mismatched with candied fruits that are too sweet for it.

Then we are brought a curdy milk ice cream with flowers, walnuts and milk chocolate in the shape of more walnuts, only these are filled with an Armagnac jelly – I can’t help but feel I would have happily settled for just the ice cream and flowers on their own.

The third and final dessert is also ice cream, lemon this time, served with a daikon radish. The radish reminds me of school dinner turnip and tastes completely out of place. Three ice creams in a row feel like a bit of a cheat; they may have been lovely, but ice cream is not difficult to make, and we’d like to have seen a kitchen of this calibre stretch itself a little more.

So, hits and misses at Mugaritz. Service was a little mixed, too…I think someone in the kitchen may have gotten a bollocking (pardon me) when N1 found a fish scale in one of the dishes where one certainly wasn’t meant to be. But rather than offer us free drinks as compensation, they could have taken more notice of N1’s repeatedly expressed desire to have the fig dessert that we knew some people were getting. One can eat so well in the tapas bars of San Sebastián that it hardly seems necessary to push the boat out on top tier San Pellegrino list restaurants; but I think we’d give Arzak another chance before repeating Mugaritz.