Nicholas Lander

PHAIDON

An Interview with Nicholas Lander

What did you learn from writing the new book, The Art of the Restaurateur? I’m not sure. It certainly reinforced an opinion I’ve held for years and years: everyone loves the restaurant business. They think it’s incredibly easy, because they do it at home for four to six people, so why not do it every night of the week for 60? The most satisfying aspect of writing the book was coming up with the smaller chapters which follow each of the profiles. These deal with distinct aspects of the business, like what you should put on the walls, or how you’re going to light the place, or how you keep up with continuous innovation. Interestingly, everyone in the restaurant business has picked up on those, and said how useful they are.

You used to own L’Escargot restaurant in central London. Did you ever need to turn people away from the door? No, I don’t think so. We were in Soho, so dress code was never an issue, and I had this wonderful manageress, Elena (Salvoni); if she told you off it was worse than a prison sentence. In terms of rules, I think you either always have an open door, or if you want to put up some ridiculous rules, then you should make them very clear from the start. I don’t think rules work though. However, I do know that currently for some restaurateurs, dress code is an issue. Smart casual means nothing, and people still want a night out. So when they go out, they dress up. They then sit next to someone who is earning considerably more than they are, and is wearing torn jeans, a t-shirt and a hugely expensive jacket. For the customers who’ve dressed up smartly, it’s a bit of a disappointment. How does the restaurateur handle that? I don’t think there’s anything you can do.

So did writing the book make you want to go back to running a restaurant? No, instant divorce! I had to sell because I was ill, and the illness was stress-related, so I knew that if I went back into the business it would ruin my health again. It's completely out of the question. Being a restaurant correspondent has allowed me to have one foot in the restaurant business without having to run one. It has just strengthened my love for the business and the people in it. Being a restauranteur is very like being a sportsman. You’re at your best in your early twenties; you can get better, but as you get older you have to learn to delegate. All those in the book have learnt that.

So what, for you, constitutes a good restaurant? A place that makes you welcome when you come in; a place that makes life easy for a customer; a place that’s flattering for women too. Life’s tough, we all work very hard, any time spent in a restaurant, other than for a business meeting, is usually a break from the working life. It’s got to offer good food, good wine and good service, and its got to be done with a sense of elegance and humour. It can’t take itself too seriously. The most common reason for a restaurant failing is over optimism combined with lack of finance. They used to say the same number of covers come onto the London market each month as come off, and I think that’s probably still true.

You’ve been The Financial Times’s restaurant critic for the past 20 years. Are there as many city boys cashing-up and moving into the business as ever? Well, there are a lot of people who are looking for a more ‘lifestyle’ career. I’ve just written about the E5 bakehouse in London Fields, and the guy there is being called up quite regularly by professionals in The City, who want to swap their high paid jobs for getting up at 4am and becoming a baker. It’s now done far more openly nowadays. In my day, you only went into cooking if you weren’t good at anything else. Thirty years ago, I was the first young Englishman to open a restaurant. In London, it was a profession for the French, the Spanish the Italians, and lots of Germans, because of the hotels. Restaurants used to be something for 40 to 60-year-olds, somewhere where you had a drink in the bar before you placed your order. It’s changed a lot.

What sort of cuisine interests you at the moment? I’m fascinated by everything, but I’m particularly interested in Korean food; it’s hot spicy, a lot of slow cooked dishes that I really enjoy. There’s a nice place just opened in Soho called Bibigo, it’s really good. I think property is key. And for a variety of reasons, as the East of London has opened up, with the Olympics , Kings Cross, its opened up an enormous amount of space; you bring in a kitchen and you have some fun.

From your research for the book, how would you characterise a good restaurateur’s motivation? It’s social; they do it because they love their fellow human beings. They’re not in it to get rich. I think all of those profiled in the book love food, and I think all of them enjoy being in the kitchen and the running of the kitchen. I don’t know them well enough personally to know whether they’re good cooks.

You live in London, how have the city's pop-up restaurants, its food trucks and informal restaurant culture changed the dining scene? It’s been amazing. It’s come about through symbiosis – landlords and property people being more appreciative of what a restaurant can bring. It’s opening up the east of the city and bringing in more and more real estate. Unfortunately, it’s one aspect of London that’s very difficult to write about, because once you’ve written about it, it’s gone. But the French are incredibly jealous. I was interviewed by someone from Le Figaro, and she said, “we have no pop up restaurants in Paris and we have two food trucks.” Of course, they do have a million bars and bistros.

Stick your neck out: which city serves the best food: London, New York or Los Angeles? Well, I find that a slightly invidious question. If you’re in London, it doesn’t matter how good the food is in New York or Los Angeles, you can’t satisfy your appetite, even with the fastest plane. And once you’re away from the city in which you work, everything tastes better. You can switch your mobile off, you don’t have to worry about the baby sitter, you can have some fun. Nevertheless, we are very lucky to be in London at the moment, and it’s going to get better. I think there are a lot of young people coming into the business and they know unless they offer very good value for money, they won’t be open for long.

How important are good table manners? They’re vital, but it's not just about table manners. I think a lot of restaurant-goers assume waiters are mind readers, so they sit down and have a bad experience and assume its the waiter’s fault. They haven’t said to the staff that they’re there for a particular reason and want to order straight away. The waiter won’t be upset, they’ll be thrilled. As far as good service goes the best service is just anticipating what the customer wants and being there for them 30 seconds before they want it. There’s a restaurateur in the book who says he knows if the service is going well if he walks in and sees that peoples eyes are fixed on each other – that’s the sign of good service.

And lastly, where did you eat last night? At home, I cooked and it was very good fun, but tonight we’re (he and his wife, legendary wine expert Jancis Robinson) going out to a very nice place called the Green Man and French Horn, which is a wine bar that specialises in cooking from the Loire, on St Martins Lane.

The Latent Image: No. 800

The Latent Image

By MAX J. MARSHALL

Post No. 800

6 July 2012

Why a blog? There are already so many.

In a field of roses, is one not the most perfect and beautiful?  Hah!  But seriously, anyone who is interested in starting a blog should do so!  Just because there are many blogs that exist, doesn’t take away from the fact that each person has an equal chance to provide interesting, unique, and stimulating content!

How has The Latent Image changed in concept, content and purpose over the years.

At first, I honestly didn’t know what I wanted the blog to be.  I did some posts on food, movies, and even paintings (gasp).  Since then, the majority of the posts have been 5 images from one photographer.  I used to post my own photographs as well as in progress projects, but I’ve since stopped doing this and focused completely on featuring other photographer’s work.

Which blogs do you follow? How do you decide what to read each day within the vast expanse of the Internet.

There are many blogs that I follow…!  I have a bookmarks folder which contains around thirty links.  I check all of these daily.  Some of my favourites are “Banana Leaves” by Christopher Schreck, “Too Much Fast Food” by Bobby Scheidemann, “Conscientious” by Jorg Colberg, “I like this blog” by Paul Paper, and of course “The Last Bite.”

I look for a lot of qualities in a blog, but most of all I value dependability and consistency. 

The direction of art. Where is it going. What does it need. What does it lack?

It’s very tough for me to definitely say the direction of art because I truly believe that art trends are fluid and ever changing.  However, I can say that I love the current push away from establishments and institutions.  More and more artists are starting collectives, self-publishing, and forming alliances.  Some of the most (what I consider to be) successful artists today are Aurelien Arbet and Jeremie Egry who do EVERYTHING.  They run a publishing company, they make photographs, they curate exhibitions, they run a blog, they make music videos, they even produced a film with Alec Soth recently.  And mind you, it’s all gold!  I love everything they do.  It’s this kind of auteur mentality that gets me excited to be part of the 21st century and its artist era.

How do you go about finding the artists that you highlight? What parameters merit a selection and subsequent post.

I source other blogs, tumblr, the news, conversations with friends, artist rosters, friend’s links, photography books, magazines, museum catalogs, auction catalogs, book stores, the list goes on!  There is no limit to where good photographers can be found.  And really, the only requirement is for me to find the photographs to be compelling, interesting, unique, or stimulating.  No BFA or MFA required.

Your own work. What's going on lately? How has your approach to photography and art changed.

Since just moving to New York with Andrea Nguyen, my girlfriend (and also collaborateur on our blog “Tillsammans, Man" !!!), I have been having a hard time keeping with my studio practice.  Andrea and I do plan to keep working on photographic series together, but finding a balance between work, NY, our cat Ducky and shooting photographs has been tough!

American artists versus the world. Who and where do you find yourself focusing upon. What trends do you see across the board?

Oh man, what an interesting question!  I’m having a hard time deciphering between the two…I don’t really think there is a categorical difference?  I think “the world” makes photographs the same way American artist’s do.  But the major difference is the vernacular that surrounds them.  Imagine if Robert Frank had gone to Canada to make his series “The Canadians”; Or a world where Ansel Adams took pictures of the Swiss Alps and not Yosemite National Park.  What would photography be like today!

What are you doing to celebrate? What's next for MJM, The Latent Image, and beyond?

The way I’m celebrating the 800th post is by reaching out and asking fans of The Latent Image to share the blog with their friends!  And most of all, if you are interested…I urge you to submit your photographs to me!  I very much appreciate the viewership that I have gotten over the years, and I am very thankful to be able to speak with you today!

NYT 2-Stars: Hill Country Barbecue Market

An Homage to Texas, by the Pound

By PETE WELLS

The New York Times

3 July 2012

IN the line of duty, I’ve eaten food served on a curl of bark, food served on a slate shingle, food served on the end of a wire, food served in an antique silver caviar caddy and food served in a box of rocks.

But for sheer power to send ripples of anticipation through the pit of my belly, none of those vehicles beat the greasy butcher paper at Hill Country Barbecue Market.

Whenever I eat at this restaurant on West 26th Street, I head for the meat counter and ask for a pound of moist brisket. If a pound strikes you as too much, then you haven’t had Hill Country’s moist brisket. A counter worker with a long knife tears off a sheet of brown paper and proceeds to bury it under slabs of meat. Beef ribs, too, yes, and some jalapeño-cheese sausages.

A couple of those, please.

Let’s make it three.

When I stop at last, the counter worker grabs the ends of the butcher paper and scrunches them to form a basket filled with smoked meat and serpentine wisps of steam. I carry that basket to my table and set it down in front of my friends, casual as can be. They look amazed, and if they don’t, I rethink the friendship.

At the table, the paper is flattened into a communal plate, and I cover one patch of it with seasoned salt. Pink from cayenne and spotted with black pepper grains, the salt goes with brisket better than barbecue sauce. Paper, meat, salt: by now my stomach is in a riot and I am sure I should have ordered two pounds of brisket.

Moist brisket on greasy paper is not the only reason to eat at Hill Country, but it’s a convincing one. The term “moist brisket” is the restaurant’s euphemism for the deckle and tip of the brisket, upholstered in fat that will slowly render and baste the meat during the 13 or 14 hours it spends in the smoker. Carved just before serving, the meat is juicy throughout, but the parts that really get me going are the blackened edges that give way to a mahogany-tinted quarter-inch or so of smoky borderland between crust and interior.

The moist brisket, along with the beef and pork ribs that carry a similarly peppery, crunchy top layer, show Hill Country’s rotisserie barbecue pits at their finest. The restaurant is a state-of-the-art Manhattan homage to the preindustrial craft of Texas barbecue, particularly as it is practiced in the town of Lockhart.

The flavors Hill Country achieves in its pits are not precisely the ones I remember from meals at Lockhart’s legendary rivals, Smitty’s Market and Kreuz Market. At both places, the smoke was deeply entrenched in the meat.

Despite burning about 1,500 pounds a week of post oak shipped in from Texas, Hill Country doesn’t produce that kind of deeply smoky barbecue. It produces very slowly roasted meat with an echo of campfire around the edges. The low smoke quotient makes a spongy, beige pork chop a disappointment, and leaves the market chicken just another slightly dry rotisserie bird.

But it does no harm to the prime rib and the beef shoulder. They may not be great Texas-style barbecue, but they are still terrific slabs of roast beef, cooked medium-rare through and through and ringed with that salt-and-pepper crust. And the jalapeño-cheese links, shipped to Manhattan by Kreuz Market, are always full flavored and insistently spicy, though their juiciness varies from day to day.

When Hill Country opened, five years ago last month, it joined a wave of new restaurants that tried to coax more smoke into barbecue than had seemed possible on the tightly regulated shores of the East River. In a glowing $25 and Under column in 2007, the last time Hill Country was reviewed in The New York Times, Peter Meehan focused on the meat, especially the brisket. “No other barbecue place that has opened in New York in recent years has gotten it so right, right out of the gate,” he wrote.

Since then, Hill Country’s other virtues have become easier to notice, or harder to ignore. Year after year I am drawn back to the dessert case for another plastic cup of banana pudding, built upon a custard so thick with eggs and cream it brings Paris to mind, and not the one in Texas. And as New York has become cluttered with strenuously playful cupcakes, few make me smile as easily as the one at Hill Country that is filled with grape jelly and frosted with a fluffy turban of peanut butter.

According to hard-liners, the only permissible side dishes with barbecue are white bread and saltines. Anything else is as out of place as a yuzu macaron.

Hill Country takes a more liberal point of view, thankfully. When I can afford to surrender the stomach space, I will have some peppery corn pudding, which has roughly the same relationship to an ear of corn that an ice cream sundae has to a cow. And I am always grateful for the relief provided by crunchy, sparingly dressed coleslaw and a vinegary salad of black-eyed peas.

None of these dishes look like restaurant food; they seem like things packed for a church picnic by the best cook in town. The cook in this case, or at least the one whose recipes the kitchen follows, is the restaurant’s executive chef, Elizabeth Karmel. Named in her honor, EAK’s Bowl of Red is a ground-beef chili that could be a meal in itself, although it’s soupy enough that I wish Hill Country really did serve it in a bowl rather than in the same paper cartons used for all the sides.

In Texas, much of the atmosphere of a barbecue joint is provided by the employees and the customers. Since shipping live Texans across state lines can be complicated, Hill Country’s owner, Marc Glosserman, bought inanimate objects like battered butcher blocks, salvaged floorboards and an old Blue Bell ice cream freezer.

All this may be mistaken for the set dressing a big chain might use, but no chain would play Ray Wylie Hubbard and Reckless Kelly, or hire bartenders who mouth the lyrics as they tuck their bottle openers into the back pockets of their jeans.

Hill Country may not be the real thing. But it plays the part better than anybody else in town.

A.L.A.

Andoni Luis Aduriz

Eater New York

By GABE ULLA

On Saturday morning, Andoni Luis Aduriz, chef of Mugaritz in San Sebastian, took a cab down from Kitchen Arts & Letters on Manhattan's Upper East Side to Minetta Tavern in the Greenwich Village. When he got there, he enjoyed a cigarette outside, before slipping into a booth at the restaurant and ordering a burger and a beer. For the next hour and a half, he did as he had done in the days before, sitting and answering questions to promote his new Phaidon book. Here's the first part of that interrogation (translated from Spanish), which deals with Aduriz finding his own voice, the experience he hopes to create at Mugaritz, and how he views words like "good" and "delicious." 

There's a sentence at the beginning of the book where you say that after cooking with Adrià and Berasategui, you realized that you had to carve out your own style. I imagine it's something lots of cooks go through, but how'd you go about it?
Before opening Mugaritz, I worked for two chefs with a lot of personality: Ferran Adrià and Martín Berasategui. It's a rather natural thing to imitate the spaces you're in for an extended time. If I move to New York, for example, I'll try my best to become a New Yorker to survive, and it's not much different when you stage somewhere. You learn how to think there, you learn how things are done, and you go to absorb. And when you leave those experiences, it's hard sometimes to even notice how much they've marked you and come through in your thinking and cooking.

When we got to Mugaritz, I definitely had a bunch of ideas that I wasn't able to work on while at other restaurants, but at the same time, it took years to develop my own style. I tend to say two years, but it was probably more. 

So how do you end up being yourself?
There are a couple of reasons you do, and it boils down to growth. I've seen it happen over the years at Mugaritz, where cooks will leave, and what they end up doing at the beginning of going at it alone is basically what they were doing at our restaurant. But we constantly try to change this restaurant, to question things, and I've had old kitchen staff come in after being away for two years and be really surprised by how different everything is. So, you can't really keep on the track of doing what someone was doing years ago for too long without it either getting old or realizing that it's not you. It all requires lots and lots and lots of reflection, I should also say. You can't be afraid of thinking.

In other words, it's gradual?
Yes, there weren't really specific efforts to do it. I think that at the end of the day you have to create a context or atmosphere of creativity. Well, at least that was the case for me. You obviously don't leave someone else's restaurant and immediately know the characteristics of what you're going to foster, but the goal is to nurture an environment where people can think and express themselves. With time, that distinguishes you.

At Mugaritz the environment is extremely critical and autocritical, and it's hard to escape that. The goal is to question everything that we do. People will ask me, "When do you come up with a dish? Where do you find inspiration for dishes?" It's all the time. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes when I'm taking a walk, sometimes when I'm sleeping, etc. It's about being in that constant state. You train yourself to be that way, to have those mechanisms and sensibilities, and that's what takes you to being yourself.

You say that you constantly question yourself and are looking to evolve.
Constantly.

But is the goal to be ahead of everyone else?
I don't know. I don't dare to say that.

Well, Ferran Adrià used to say that was the goal at elBulli. 
Yeah, but look, for us, the revolutionary thing was realizing that people don't come to our dining room just to eat. They come for many things, and among them is to be fed. It's a space to feel things.

What we worry about at this restaurant is this: 94% of our clientele is from outside the Basque country, with about half of that percentage from outside Spain. So, I'll go to the table and chat with someone, and when I ask if they're passing through or visiting the city, they'll tell me that they came specifically to eat here. Someone who's taken the weekend off, made the effort to come here — how insane do you think their expectations are? Do you really think they just want to put tasty food in their mouths?

I'll ask them what they expect from the restaurant and often, they don't know what to say. You could say that that's because people come to Mugaritz not knowing what they want, but that wouldn't be true. It's that they often don't know how to put it into words. It makes sense, too, if the guests haven't been here before and therefore really can't be precise about it. But I can tell you exactly what they all don't want.

What's that?
For nothing to happen. Things have to happen, you have to move them, you have to excite them. These days, gastronomy is so ambiguous and abstract and there isn't an absolute truth— something that's becoming clearer and clearer — and journalists are moving more and more from critiquing to describing experiences/ There's a lot of cooking that is about projecting your way of understanding the world, and it gets to a point where you lack the tools to explain what's going on or you can't really say what's good or bad. That being said, there are of course certain objective judgments you can make.

You're going for an experience, then. Can you describe that more?
What we try to propose is a trip or a walk where we synthesize our knowledge, our story, our skills, our fears. We invite people to take our hand and go down a path where you'll see who we are, where we come from, where we are now, and what we've been thinking about. It's all there. And we'll give you cues and signals along the way so that you're aware of what's going on.

People will look at the book and say that there are lots of plays on words or tricks or trompe l'oeils. But that's not what we're going for. When you try to be creative, you can't place something that's new or innovative in too abstract a way so that it's disconcerting or impossible to pick out. You have to make it legible in some way or another.

Give me an example.
We did a watermelon carpaccio. People see it, eat it, and likely say, "How fun! How neat!" But that dish comes out of a lot of thought and reflection: all of our traditional and local cuisine uses vegetables like onions, garlic, asparagus, and tomato. All of those have capabilities for sweet flavor, like when you make a sofrito with onion or something like that, but we're used to associating them with savory preparations. We started thinking, "What if we go the other way and cook with something sweet? We did all sorts of sofritos and broths with plums and other fruits — tons of tests — but what ended up really working was something I had come up with but actually forgot about.

What was it?
I told a cook to start playing with watermelon, and one day I'm walking through the kitchen while everyone is resting before dinner service and see this tray of meat. I said, "Who the hell left the meat out?" It turns out it was the watermelon, and shit, it had a perfectly analogous texture and flavor to meat.

The other thing we were thinking about with that is the idea that when you eat a whole menu of vegetables, you can often feel like you're missing something at the end — some protein. And this manages to fill that space. You can eat this and it'll feel complete, which is pretty great. My point is that that little game or trick of appearances can be a good tool to shine a light on that one new idea. If it's too abstract or busy, it can get distorted, because a bunch of extraordinary things isn't always the best. It's about harmony.

We serve about twenty dishes now, and sure, we could be really precious and complicated, or we could make it a kind of party. Can't you learn while having a really good time?

Do you think guests pick up on the fact that you're going for something a little deeper than a wink with dishes like that?
There is a lot of communication with the guests, and customers these days know where they are going, in a way. At Mugaritz we emphasize creativity, understanding our products, and work. All the while, we seek excellence and the artisanal. I'll put it this way: if we came here, ordered some burgers, and they gave us some obnoxious, abstract interpretation of a hamburger, we'd be pretty unhappy. It's much the same if you go to a place like Mugaritz and are just fed.

There are many different types of restaurants, and people have the capacity to choose what kind of experience they're in the mood for. These days, if people make errors in judgment with that, it's pretty much because they want to. Or, obviously, because the place sucks. It's much the same with music or art: if you want to see a heavy metal concert, you're probably not gonna buy tickets to "The Lion King" on Broadway.

We're lucky at Mugaritz, because people more or less know what they want, and we try to give them that. Like I said, a meal here is a trip where I take your hand and show you. I work for you, I try to be creative year round for you, I search for things for you, I learn for you, I think for you, I travel for you, and I cook for you. It's a sincere commitment to the guests, and we're open to the fact that we may be wrong in some cases and that some people may not like it.

You know, I went to cooking school decades ago, and there they taught me how to make delicious food. It's not my goal to make delicious food anymore. I want to make interesting food.

Then what do you say to chefs or critics who criticize haute cuisine or tasting menus or creative cooking that isn't "delicious."? In other words, the people who say that every single dish has to taste great above all else. 

Whenever anyone wants to sit down and have a calm, civilized discussion on what deliciousness is, I'm game. We can talk about what's hidden behind the phrases "This is good" or "This tastes good." If I take a suckling pig, which I think is delicious, and put it in front of a Jewish person or Muslim, they might flip or be disgusted. It could be worse than serving them a roasted dog. There are people that can't start their day without a cup of coffee. OK, but is that because it's delicious or because it's pleasant? My son is two, and his palate is totally clean. If you give him some coffee, he'll be shocked and displeased.These are the toxic seeds of a plant, which we then burn! It's bitter, intense, and appreciated because of cultural habit and acclimation. It's learned. In other words, things are, and then you decode them.

My mom, who cooks like a badass, has never tried Japanese food. If I gave her some, she'd hate it, because she lacks the cultural cues and the tools to read them. A lot of people think that eating is sensorial. More than that, it's about interpreting the information that your senses give you. When you see something — the concept of beauty isn't in the simple sight but rather it's in what you interpret from what that sight gives you. You know, if I gave an Indian person a massive, juicy, delicious steak, he'd be disgusted. I respect people who say things like that about taste, but "good" and "delicious" are very tricky things to discuss.

And I'm game to talk about it with anyone, as long as it's a serene, sound, calm debate, because maybe I am wrong. But I really do think there is an anthropology of the senses and that we need to understand that and learn about that. In Spain, if you wore a hat inside the restaurant, like you are now, it wouldn't be acceptable. But where are we? You have to adapt and try to understand. You have to understand the context and keep an open mind and know that truths are relative, especially in food.

People will often use tradition to criticize progressive cooking. Look at this table, though: cheese, wine, beer — these are things essentially created by errors that we've adopted and are now accepted. It's all a little more complicated than it may seem.

In part two of this interview with Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz, the chef talks about how there's nothing pretentious about having a restaurant with didactic qualities, discusses anti-intellectualism in the world of cooking, emphasizes the importance of fun in a kitchen, and explains how he negotiates the natural and the technical.

You say that for a guest, coming to Mugaritz is like taking the kitchen's hand and going on a journey where you will need to be guided and you'll need to keep an open mind. That implies a certain didacticism, which some people probably get turned off by. Would you agree with that?
Yes, yes. When you come to this restaurant, do you come to eat what you like, and is that fun?

Yeah.
Yes, that can be great, because you know what you like and you certainly don't want to have a bad time. But let's go further: is having fun eating only about finding the pleasures that you're already familiar with?

I'm going to guess that you don't believe that to be the case.
Right. I have a friend who is a biologist in Spain. He writes about how the way we eat today — the way we understanding eating — is a very, very new thing. For centuries and centuries, eating was about uncertainty, because you didn't know what you could find and you didn't know if what you were putting in your mouth could kill you. That's really no longer the case.

Yet that way of thinking is in many ways ingrained in us, despite the fact that in this context it doesn't make much sense. You'll hear people talk about their grandma's cooking and their mother's cooking, and that's an instinctual thing: the first bites of food that didn't kill them probably came from those people. You'll hear about the amazing tortilla that someone's abuela used to make, and it may have been pretty good, but the best part of grandma's cooking is almost always grandma. If you had that tortilla sixty years later, it probably wouldn't be that great.

But this is a really powerful force: you have the biological aspect, the aspects of affectation, and the cultural aspect, which is about identity and pride. It's so strong that it's logical that people stick with those ideas.

But how do you see it?
There is so much pleasure that comes from understanding, discovering, and expanding your knowledge, too. Paradoxically, people really like that. So, if I tell you that when I eat this burger, I eat it because I like it, and that in the things that I like there is something ludic that gives me pleasure, why does that nullify another kind of cooking?

Look at museums, which are designed for pleasure. They're designed for you to not only see but to interact and learn and understand while having a good time. If museums can become more and more interactive and proof that you can learn having fun, why can't restaurants be like that? If we can learn while having fun, why are we going to deal with tedious, boring bullshit? If people don't understand that, fine, I guess.

You and some of your colleagues seem to get a measure of heat for trying to express themselves, speaking at symposiums, and dabbling in other disciplines. There are those that say that cooks are cooks and that they should keep their heads down and work. What do you feel about that?
I totally acknowledge that that is a strong force, but where is the problem there? It's not my fault or the fault of other chefs who attend congresses or try to talk about ideas. It's someone else's anti-intellectualism. It's a symptom of a lack of curiosity and, as a result, education.

I don't consider myself an artist, but I'll continue to express myself and talk about ideas. I tell the people I work with that for everyone that may criticize us or say something truly unpleasant, we have to apply all of our patience, plus their total lack of patience. We're giving it double. There'll always be people that don't like what we do, but that's not a big deal.

If people are bothered by a search for knowledge, the only way to respond is for me to search harder. If people are critical of progressive cuisine, the only way to counter it is with more progression. You know, I've poured my heart and soul into a little book that's coming out in Spain, which I collaborated on with a philosopher. It's a book by a cook and a philosopher. Are critical people going to stop me from doing something like that? No. When people say pejoratively that I'm trying to be a mystic or a philosopher, then I just hit them with more philosophy or at least ideas that I have thought about and express sincerely. You don't like ideas? OK, we'll give you some more.

It kind of pisses you off. 
It's not that it pisses me off, really. It's just that you have to defend your little space. I try to respect everyone else's spaces for expression and for doing their own thing, so I need to work to preserve mine.

Let's go back to your cooking. Do you think that every plate has to be a knockout, or do you tend to be more concerned with the total experience — the feeling the diner has at the conclusion of the meal?

That's a good question. I tend to think of both at the same time, honestly. Each plate is a story, but the important thing is the total experience. As a result, there are a lot of very good dishes that don't make the menu, because they'd mess with the balance of the meal. It has to be coherent.

Before we opened for this season, I had the menu three times to make sure everything was balanced — to see if there was too much or too little. We think about it so much.

The biggest problem we do find is that we'll come up with something — a technique — that's spectacular and exciting, but it doesn't fit harmoniously. For something to be new doesn't mean it's great. What we do in that case is table it, work on it a bit, and believe me, it ends up showing up at some point.

For a person who hasn't gone to Mugaritz and might just be reading articles that talk about your training at elBulli and the rocks that are actually potatoes and so on, it may seem jarring to see an emphasis on both progressive cooking and the natural. How would you explain it to that person? I acknowledge that that person may not exist, but give it a shot. 
A new technique doesn't take away the natural qualities of a product. You can do something extremely technical and still preserve the natural. They don't clash. You know, you could do something with extremely natural components and turn it into an artificial, abstract thing. What we go for at Mugaritz is an end result that has an organic aesthetic and feel.

We do an immensely complicated dish of sea bream eggs. To make it happen, we have to collaborate with an aquarium. The eggs have to be live, not touch sweet water, and are unfertilized. After that, there's a ton that goes into making the plate. Do people perceive that? No, and that's the goal. The end result is seamless and natural.

I'll add: you can drink wine filled with nitrites or contaminated broccoli. You may perceive them as natural, but. There are natural poisons and there are artificial things are very good for you. The point is, both forces can be good and bad.

There are charts in the book that explain how the menu has changed over the years, but I'm wondering how you view the restaurant's evolution in general.
What's your favorite soccer team?

Real Madrid.
Well, I'll use Barça as an example. There's lots of technique in everything they do, but you know when it becomes extraordinary? When technique seems to disappear — it becomes integral — and you start having fun and it all comes out without forcing it. That's where we are now. When you start having fun with what you have and stop bemoaning what you don't, it's liberating and empowering. I do things because I enjoy them and can do them sincerely.

I tell my staff that I used to work at restaurants that were propelled by fear and tension; there was pain in the kitchen and pleasure in the dining room. We seek excellence, and to do that you need to search for knowledge and work hard. Doing things well assures quality, but you have to go one step further and make it enjoyable. There has to be balance and pleasure. That's where the magic is.