How did San Sebastián become one of the best places to eat on the planet?

I’m in a restaurant dining room holding a spoon that’s cradling a deceptively simple egg yolk. Back in the kitchen, the chef had extracted a small portion of the raw yolk with a syringe, then re-filled it with a warm truffle-spiked consume, thus poaching the egg from the inside out. Once I plop the yolk into my mouth, there’s a burst of flavor, a marriage of creaminess and umami that washes over my palate. It’s revelatory.

I’m at Azurmendi, a Michelin-three-star restaurant in Spain’s Basque country helmed by talented 46-year-old chef Eneko Atxa. The food here is certainly cutting-edge, but here in Basque Country, that’s not particularly surprising.

In this region in northeastern Spain, particularly in and around the town of Donostia as the Basque people call it, or San Sebastián to the rest of the world, lauded restaurants are abundant. San Sebastián and its environs have the second most Michelin stars per capita than anywhere on the planet. In addition to Azurmendi, restaurants such as Arzak, Martin Berasategui, Akelare, Mugaritz, Elkano, and Extebarri have become dining destinations for food-loving travelers from around the world.

“You could make the argument that there is no better place to eat in Europe than the city of San Sebastián,” said Anthony Bourdain. “The love of food, the insistence on the very best ingredients, is fundamental to the culture and to life here.” He wasn’t exaggerating.

While tourists cram the centers of Barcelona, Madrid, and Sevilla, how did it come to pass that San Sebastián—a town of 200,000 people that is often overlooked by tourists—gained this level of gastronomic notoriety?

Several local chefs have trumpeted the oft-repeated line that cuisine here is defined by an insistence on using “local, seasonal ingredients.” And only the best at that…

Well, there are chefs in the American Midwestern town of Dubuque or Wagga Wagga in Australia or Runcorn in the UK who are also using “local seasonal ingredients,” but no one is rushing there to eat. There’s something else going on in San Sebastián, something deeper.

“A word that kept coming up in my research and interviews was ‘kuadrilla,’ a Basque word that connotes a tight-knit group.”

I started my journey in San Sebastián by heading back in time. In the 19th century, elites and aristocrats from Spain and France began gravitating to the seaside Basque town to spend summers there. Some of them navigated the river system of northeastern Spain to arrive. And with that, a cottage industry was born: Young women from mountain villages would spend their summers in San Sebastián learning how to cook, particularly in the French manner.

This set the foundations for superior Basque fare. Some of those young women ended up opening their own restaurants. For example, about 10 miles up the Urumea River from San Sebastian is a restaurant called Fagollaga, which was founded to feed wealthy wayfarers who were coming to San Sebastián via boat for their vacation. The restaurant still exists, though it’s no longer catering to princes and potentates. Anyone with a handful of euros can graze on dishes like ‘cod bonbon its own emulsion,’ and smoked sardines wading in a pool of ajoblanco, a light garlicky soup.

The week I recently spent in San Sebastián corresponded with the San Sebastián Gastronomika, an annual restaurant industry conference that brings some of the best chefs in Spain (and all the top Basque toques) to one place for three days.

The first person I started talking to about the food scene here was not Basque though—and not even Spanish—but one of the most famous chefs on the planet: Rene Redzepi, chef of Noma in Copenhagen who was attending the conference.

“I walked across Basque country last year as part of the Camino de Santiago and the one thing I could feel when I was passing through villages and small towns was a deep and strong sense of community,” he told me. “This power of doing something as a group, as a team, was incredibly inspiring to me. That was much more powerful for me than learning how to make a new dish. Because this brings energy and culture. This is why San Sebastián, and the Basque region, is the best place in Europe to eat.”

Redzepi, I’d come to figure out, was onto something about his sensing a strong sense of community here. A word that kept coming up in my research and interviews was kuadrilla, a Basque word that connotes a tight-knit group.

After San Sebastián was established as a summer retreat for European elites, pioneering chefs Juan Mari Arzak and Pedro Subijana, of Arzak and Akelarre respectively, became intrigued by the development of Nouvelle Cuisine across the border in France in the mid 1970s.

As Juan Mari Arzak had previously said, “After the hardships of the post-war period, Basque cuisine—like all Spanish cuisine—had lost its best qualities. It had become routine and ordinary, and haute cuisine was becoming a victim of its own rigid and immutable principles.”

Enter Nouvelle Cuisine. It updated French fare, making it lighter, more innovative, more delicate. When Arzak and Subijana learned of this development, they traveled to Lyon to learn from the great chef Paul Bocuse. Together, with some of their Basque kitchen colleagues, they applied the techniques of Nouvelle Cuisine to Basque fare.

“One interesting yardstick is to head over to the French Basque territory to see how innovative the food has become. Answer: Not much. The haute French fare they’re serving just across the border has been acknowledged—there’s a whole constellation of Michelin one-starred spots in Pays Basque, the French side of Basque Country, but cutting-edge vis-à-vis New Basque Cuisine, it is not.”

But then they did something interesting: They removed some of the main French aspects of their Nouvelle Cuisine inspired by Basque fare—gone, for example, were the sauces that are chief to French cuisine but not at all endemic to Basque food.

And with that New Basque Cuisine was born. But here’s where kuadrila comes into play. Instead of keeping their innovations secret, Arzak and Subijana gathered other talented Basque chefs and shared what they were doing. This wasn’t a set strategy, but an example of kuadrilla—the sense of community inherent in Basque culture.

“There was an agreement to not really compete with each other, but to share information with other Basque chefs in an attempt to raise the level of the cuisine,” chef Pedro Subijana of Michelin three-star Akelarre told me. “We wanted to free ourselves of the shackles of the past and have an open mind about a new cuisine that we were working on.”

It was more like a ‘co-opetition’—a blend of cooperation and competition. Arzak and Subijana eventually formed the Gang of 12, a dozen Basque chefs in and around San Sebastián, to help elevate and transform Basque cuisine. The 10 others include Ricardo Idiáquez, María Jesús Fombellida, Pedro Gómez, Manuel Iza and Jesús Mangas, Patxi Kintana, José Juan Castillo, Karlos Arguiñano, Ramón Roteta, Xabier Zapirain and Luis Irizar. They were a kuadrila, an ‘esprit de corps’, a tight-knit band.

It’s tempting to put this movement into a larger historical context: Longtime Spanish dictator Francesco Franco summered in San Sebastián—at the same time he was intent on erasing Basque culture and language from the northeastern Spanish landscape. Wasn’t this new-found zeal to bring new life to Basque cuisine inspired by Franco’s death in 1975, around the same time the chefs were cherry-picking Nouvelle Cuisine from the French and creating a new progressive, revolutionary cuisine in the Basque Country?

“It was a moment when everything came together at the right time,” said Gabriella Ranelli, an American who has lived in San Sebastián since the 1980s and runs food-themed walking tours of the area via Tenedor Tours. Instead, Ranelli points to the Movida movement—the post-Franco period of creativity and newfound expression that was sparked after the dictator’s death—saying it helped create fertile ground for the foundations of New Basque Cuisine.

“The whole country was opening up at that time and so it may be tangentially related,” he tells me. “New Basque Cuisine was already happening, but the Movida movement may have pushed it along.”

I later ran into Joxe Mari Aizega, the director of the influential Basque Culinary Center, who placed a little more significance in the death of Franco. “It’s true that the immediate post-Franco period was a time when we were coming into democracy,” he said. “People suddenly had the freedom to build a new society. This was an influence, for sure. Along with that, there was the influence of Nouvelle Cuisine from France. We share a border with France, after all.”

He’s right. And one interesting yardstick is to head over to the French Basque territory to see how innovative the food has become. Answer: Not much. The haute French fare they’re serving just across the border has been acknowledged—there’s a whole constellation of Michelin one-starred spots in Pays Basque, the French side of Basque Country, but cutting-edge vis-à-vis New Basque Cuisine, it is not. And from this, we can see just how far Juan Mari Arzak and his other Basque chefs have come.

In 1989, Arzak was the first restaurant in Spain to earn three Michelin stars. Just a couple of years before that, a chef named Ferran Adria became the executive chef at a restaurant in Catalonia called El Bulli. At the San Sebastián Gastronomika conference in October 2023, I listened in to a small press conference he was giving where he stated that El Bulli would not have been possible without the innovations of New Basque Cuisine. There’s a reason why Spain has more restaurants on the 2023 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list than any other country on the planet—and it started right here in Basque Country.

It inspired and changed the cuisine of an entire country and helped put Spain on the gastronomic map—both at the most elevated levels and for more pedestrian fare. Head to any bar in San Sebastián that has a menu of pintxos, the Basque version of tapas, and you’ll get exquisite small bites of things like grilled foie gras, tender sous-vide-cooked chunks of ribeye, and anchovies so plump and tender they should be renamed ‘ocean gold.’ The innovations from the top of New Basque Cuisine have trickled down to the salt-of-the-earth bars in San Sebastián, the rest of the region, and beyond, each one ideal with a glass of txakoli, a semi-effervescent white wine from the Basque Country.

When I caught up with Chef Eneko Axta of Azurmendi on the evening of my dinner there, he helped add a little bit of historical perspective. “In terms of the chefs, it was the one thing we could do,” he said. “We were chefs and the culinary world was our domain, so what could we do to promote Basque culture after Franco tried so hard to destroy it for decades? We not only had to solve the problem for the local people, but we also wanted to revive tourism here and serve food for people who wanted to visit us. What is something that can unify all of us here? The thing that unified us the most was the food.”

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