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Mugaritz, Andoni Luis Aduriz's hyper-creative restaurant in San Sebastian, has re-opened for a celebrative 25th season with yet another boundary-pushing menu, this year built around the idea of challenging the logic and perception of taste.
This season, diners will once again be invited to step outside of their comfort zone and explore 23 to 25 'bites' on the theme of taste. Each 'bite' is testament to months of dedicated research undertaken by the team behind closed doors, using complex techniques including extensive work with enzymes (for example, amylase, pectinase and glucosidase) as well as more exploration into the field of fermentation.
Photo credit: Oscar Oliva
“Mugaritz has trodden a path that goes in the opposite direction to the orthodox route. In 2022, we will take the opportunity to continue doing what inspires us so much: questioning what’s in and what’s out. What works right now and what doesn’t," said Aduriz.
"What we are supposed to like and what we are supposed to dislike, highlighting something that has always been fundamental for us: the involvement of the diners. The journeys they make and the beauty they find will depend on them, whether it is in what is apparent and even obvious, and also in what is not even encountered at first sight.”
Photo Credit: Alex Iturralde
Mugaritz menu 2022 - See the Dishes
Take a look at a selection of the dishes and descriptions from the new menu below.
Gazes
This dish is made from caviar and pine nuts with a visor fashioned from caramelised black apple, and is designed to encourage diners to undertake an exercise in confronting themselves. "Each diner faces what is inside him or her, a face-to-face with what you carry inside you," said a statement from Mugaritz's research and development team.
Trick
A finger made from a carrot stick with carrot juice inside is accompanied by a blue cheese cream. "We have been eating with our hands for years at Mugaritz, but this time we have transformed it into a piece of cutlery. We take eating with our hands to a meta-game about this within what is a simple carrot crudité."
Trick
Enzymatic molasses of rye bread
A dish of sea urchin buds accompanied by enzymatic molasses, which is achieved by putting rye bread in a bath of amylase, an enzyme that degrades starches into simple sugars, allowing the molasses to be generated. "It's a technical dish, here the important thing is to see how to get the molasses using enzymes. It also a journey of the two most contrasting tastes: first the bitter and then the sweet."
Enzymatic molasse of rye bread and sea urchin
Gyotaku
"For this dish we were inspired by one of the traditional methods used by Japanese fishermen to make impressions of fish, a kind of fingerprint of the fish." Mugaritz has recreated the technique in this dish with beef tendon and octopus.
Gyotaku
Images: José Luis López de Zubiría/ Mugaritz
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