San Sebastian: a marathon of marriage and Michelin stars
The month of May went by in a blur of wedding dresses, champagne receptions and flower arrangements. Given that there’s a 90% chance of me launching into an anti-patriarchy/anti-religion rant at any given wedding I attend, it’s a wonder that people invite me at all, let alone give me roles to play like reading at the ceremony or helping with the food (ok, so that last one is a little more understandable). Still, no less than four wedding invitations dropped through my mailbox this spring, the last of which was in San Sebastian: food capital of the Basque Country, Spain, Europe and – arguably – the world. It didn’t take me long to reply in the affirmative and turn the whole love-and-commitment thing into a full blown gastro-mini-break.
The day before the wedding, another invitee and I had booked a table at Akelaŕe: a restaurant that has held three sparkly Michelin stars since 2007. For some reason, it *only* reached 94th place in the recently published list of the world’s best restaurants, whereas two of its Donastian competitors made it into the top ten (gutted). But we stuck with our instincts and weren’t disappointed. Akelaŕe’s chef, Pedro Subijana, offers two ten-course tasting menus that showcase Basque cuisine and ingredients. Well, it would have been rude not to, so we got stuck in…
The amuse was just mental: it looked like squeezy soap, moisturiser, mouthwash, a make-up sponge and a sachet of something exfoliant. What the contents of the bathroom cabinet actually turned out to be, however, were a basil emulsion that you squeeze onto dehydrated onion bread, with a cheese-based cream, fishy bits (in an edible package) and a champagne cocktail. Well I never!
Next came crab claw, crab blini and a pasta salad made of orzo, flowers and some kind of succulent plant’s leaves. The taste of the sea.
Razor clam with veal shank and cauliflower mushrooms, this is one of Akelaŕe’s signature dishes. Quintessentially meaty and the ONLY mushrooms I have ever been able to eat.
To. Die. For. The best foie gras I have eaten since Le Bistrot Du Praz in Courcehevel in 1999, it came with “salt ‘n pepper” (very definitely in inverted commas). The sea salt was flakes of sugary textural contrast, while the peppercorns were in fact puffed rice grains. I made a lot of embarrassing yummy noises.
This battered, slow-cooked fried egg was served with the sweetest baby peas imaginable. Other summer baby veg were battered and fried like the egg.
The turbot was served three ways: on the left, it was simply pan-fried; in the centre is a crispy chip of its skin; and on the right is its “kokotxa” or cheek with a creamy pil-pil sauce. This was the only dish I wasn’t enthralled by: gelatinous fish cheek and too-rich sauce was an odd textural combination for my taste.
We all know I’m a sucker for pork, and this one nearly made me fall off my chair in excitement. It was belly pork (my absolute favourite) with an emulsion of Iberico. Add to that some meringue (weird, but it worked) and tomato “bolao” (don’t ask me what that means) and you have the crispiest, porkiest, sweetest, meatiest plateful of lekker-ness you can imagine.
Just the menu description of this was a stroke of genius: the title of the dish was “Milk and grape, cheese and wine in parallel evolution”. Essentially, you started with raw sheep’s milk curd and peeled grapes, and you worked your way up through gradually maturing cheeses and more intricate grape preparations (think wine dust and Pedro Ximinez) to gorgonzola ice cream and brandy syrup. Your mission? To witness “the transformations that the grape and milk suffers from the origin up to the oldness”. Do you think they’d hire me as Chief Menu Editor?!
And then, just when we thought things couldn’t get any better, the kitchen screwed up and brought us an extra dessert from the other menu – for free! It was sort of like an egg yolk and almond filled oliebol with what looked like enormous white pumice stones that melted into a quarter of their volume in coconut ice cream on contact with a spoon. Hard to describe.
Our actual dessert involved cocoa ice cream, chocolate candy floss and an eye-poppingly sherbet-y citrus shell. In the words of Craig Revel Horwood: Fab-u-lous.
We couldn’t let lunch come to an end without coffee and chocolates, of course. The latter came in a dish covered in an edible skin that tasted of pear (if you can imagine that) and included four squares of an orange, sugar-covered jelly that tasted of grapefruit. It made us both go “oooh…. ooph!” simultaneously. A stellar end to a stellar meal.
Oh, and did I mention that the bride’s sister is friends with one of the waiters? So we got a prime table overlooking the Bay of Biscay… Not only that, but one of our other waiters found us and our food babies wandering around outside after lunch and offered us a lift down the mountain. Not just three-star food, but three-star service to match.
