Etxebarri

The long-awaited first book from the Etxebarri restaurant, considered one of the best grill restaurants in the world.

Chef Bittor Arginzoniz has earned worldwide fame as a genius of the grill from his restaurant Etxebarri, in Axpe (Biscay), founded more than twenty-five years ago, with no reference point other than the oldest culinary technique in the world. With fire, grills and utensils of his own design, the use of specific woods and an obsessive quest for the finest produce, Arginzoniz has revolutionised the way meat, fish and vegetables are grilled the world over.

In thirty-five years of visiting the best and most avant-garde restaurants in the world every day, on very few occasions have I perceived a revolution so natural, so noble, so distinctive, so authentic, so selfless, so hard-won and so sublime. And so, so sensible.

Bittor Arginzoniz's immense achievement is to have applied to the grill the concepts of the culinary revolution that Spain experienced during the last decade of the 20th century and the first of the 21st; principles that spread across the world and changed history. In that context, he brings forth the haute cuisine of the open fire. And he has done so with brilliant clairvoyance: making the Basque farmstead universal. With a boundless love for the landscape, tradition and his feelings, and with a nonconformist, global intelligence that embraces ideas, and even products, achieving a perfect symbiosis between history and future, between passion for his land and openness to mental and material excellence. He has never set boundaries on his work, neither in the delicacies he has used nor in the inspirations he has drawn on. And all of this conveying an unmistakably Basque and unmistakably personal message. There stands the contemporary grill restaurant and there stands Etxebarri. A celebration of principles and a celebration of self-improvement. The book is in Spanish.