Starstruck: Review Restaurant Martin Berasategui - San Sebastian, Spain

I recently - ex post - found out that I have been to a one starred Michelin restaurant before (Yauatcha, London in 2009), but all I remember is that it was delicious but I probably was not in the mindset and certainly less aware to thoroughly focus on each dish and its compositon.

Fast forward to the beginning of October 2016:

I always wanted to feast myself through San Sebastian since it is often described as one of the culinary hotspots in the world. It shouldn't come as a surprise considering the heavy influence of Spanish and French cuisine.

Thanks to the well known Julien Walther, whose blog (in German) is a must read if you want to combine your travel with great gustatory perceptions (or just to have a great read), I luckily managed to skip my first as well as the most obvious and popular choices in that region (Arzak and Azurmendi to name a few). Reading his reviews of those restaurants seemed to fulfill most of the prejudices people with limited (that includes me) experiences have towards such venues: stiff, over the top, theatrical, pretentious and often bereft of any resemblance to the original product (dry ice, lyophilisation anyone?).

So I, with a wallet that cannot be as frequently opened for such ventures, was the grateful beneficiary of his endeavor.  

So six weeks before our departure I managed to have areservation at the Restaurant Martin Berasategui for lunch on Friday, October 7th. The restaurant, that received its third star in 2001, is located in Lasarte-oria, 10km southwest of San Sebastian.

The menu is straightforward with starters coming for 44 €, the main dishes for 71 € and the desserts for 32 €. So you are not forced to opt for a 15+ courses degustation menu although you can (€ 220/20 courses). Something even I noticed: Bottles of wine are, as common in Spain, reasonably priced compared to the UK or France. We had a great white wine (bottle 55 €) but I have to make my initial excitement culpable for not having taken a photo of the bottle or having remembered its name.

We are served some fresh homemade sour dough bread with different sorts of butter (beetroot, salted, spinach, stone mushroom). Delicious!

The first pleasant surprise: As we intended to order more food than we could probably eat since we wanted to taste as much as possible, the staff recommended to serve us half – portions of the dishes we would like to taste as their portions are quite large. Why would we dissent?

The first amuse-bouche is Mille-feuille of smoked eel, foie-gras, spring onions and green apple.

The Mille-feuille, typically a sweet, multi-layered pastry, is served here with a slightly crunchy, caramelized layer on the top and with a subtle and smooth foie-gras layer at the bottom with the smoked eel in between. This is accompanied by a light spring-onion cream. Well, this was about the point where my company and I nearly stopped talking to each other for the next 3,5 hours.

The Mille-feuille is followed by Red Shrimp Royale and dill with Venta del Barón oil.

It is an excellent composition, very light but still intense and if you really slurp it you can taste excellent olive oil. Venta del Baron (from Cordoba) is supposed to be the best olive oil in the world and although I am not too knowledgeable about olive oils - you can taste it. Or is it just because the menu says so? We’ll never find out but that’s what happens if you are really involved.

For the next three courses we simply followed the aforementioned blog with one additional meal I really wanted to taste. This strategy proved to be fatal – in a positive way but more on that later!

So as a starter it has to the Iberian Ham “Capa Negra”. At least regarding ham I can say that I have tasted a lot with varying experiences. This one though (we learn from the subtle, yet attentive and very funny staff is Berasategui’s self-produced ham) is of another class altogether. Served with roasted, olive oil and tomato marinated white bread it just melts in your mouth and leaves a great nutty flavor as a reminder. We agree that it is highly improbable that we will be eating ham again anytime soon.

Then, as per script, the Grilled sirloin «Luismi» over a bed of Swiss chard chlorophyll and cheese bonbon reaches our table. Luismi, based in Galicia, is Senor Berasategui’s preferred high quality butcher and both of us agree that this piece of meat puts everything we had in the past to utter shame. Smokey, buttery and nutty and excellently flanked by Swiss chard and cheese bonbons that softly explode in your mouth revealing warm, liquid cheese.

 

Out of curiosity we had ordered “Young pigeon, charcoal roasted at a low temperature with potato and truffle bites and forgotten vegetables” as well.

I never had pigeon and therefore lack a reference for comparison but this dish was a revelation as on how to combine basic ingredients in such a way to culminate into fantastic and homogenous dish. The pigeon is heated in the oven for six minutes and then roasted on charcoal for a few moments. The meat was very tender and according me, also due the lack of ample words, tasted a bit sourer (or fleshier?) than other sorts of meat I had. Add to that one of those truffle bites and one of those cereal-wheat crackers in your mouth and you have slightly sweet and crunchy bite.

 

We ask for a coffee break as we are quiet full. We bring forward that we would very much fancy a walk outside in the garden. “Don’t ask please, this is your home. Feel at home!” And we do feel at home.

Thirty minutes later we are ready for our dessert which is… an apple pie! Ok, an apple pie filled with a Granny Smith sorbet and an Armagnac cream but still: an apple pie!

This is another example on how to prepare a simple dish with excellent products (apple, the butter used for the dough..) The dough, so it seems like at least, has infinite layers and has the right crack-crisp-to-vanish – in – your – mouth – ratio.

The meal is rounded off with a selction of sweets. I can imagine they were all excellent but I am not the greatest fan of plain chocolate and since my organism and brain literally went into digestion mode, I was probably incapable of reflecting any further.

I mentioned earlier that our choice proved to be fatal. Of course this is quiet exaggerated but here is what I mean: We basically, as you can see on the pictures, ordered dishes that do not seem hard to replicate at home. You can buy ham, sirloin, vegetables and ingredients for an apple pie. But neither - first and foremost - do we have the skills Senor Berasategui and his staff possess nor do we have easy access to such premium quality products. Had we opted for a restaurant that served dishes (again extensive use of dry ice, lyophilisation of "you name it") creating an immense visual (and perhaps gustatory) gap between product, presentation and composition we might have not felt that way. Of course it is hard now to select ham, meat or any other ingredient but at least in my case it lead to a further decrease of meat consumption and we remain thankful to have enjoyed dishes which seemed (looked) familiar but tasted excellent due to skills of preparation and the use of products with extaordinary quality.