Elena Arzak, Arzak, San Sebastián, Spain

Elena Arzak, along with father Juan Mari, runs three-Michelin Star restaurant, Arzak, in the Basque region of northern Spain. 

A family-run business for more than a hundred years, Arzak has been at the forefront of Basque and international cuisine since the nineteen seventies when Juan Mari Arzak began to pioneer New Basque Cuisine. Elena re-joined the kitchen in the 1990s after six years working abroad and since then has worked side-by-side with her father in the restaurant recently ranked eighth best in the world. In 2012 she was crowned the World’s Best Female Chef. The Staff Canteen caught up with Elena on one of her frequent visits to the UK to check up on progress at Arzak’s London project, Ametsa with Arzak Instruction, which recently won its first Michelin star.

How did it feel to grow up in such a rich family tradition of cooking?

There have been four generations of Arzak chefs since 1897; I am the fourth generation. As children, my sister and I used to go to the restaurant very often because we lived very close and all the family were there – my grandmother, my mother, my aunt and my father. We used to spend two hours a day at the restaurant; that was when I realised that I really loved food. I always wanted to stay longer but they didn’t allow me because I was a child.  I used to say to the staff: “Please let me make dishes for the dining room.” I was always trying to do more.

Apart from your father, you trained under many great chefs.

I used my father’s relations and influences to do stages at many great restaurants. I spent six months in Le Gavroche in London in 1989. I came for three months but I stayed for six because I liked it very much. They treated me very well; I liked the ambience and I learned a lot because I was just starting and when you are starting you are like a sponge. It was there that I found out that British food was very good. It was just starting to take off at that time and Albert and Michel Roux Jr taught me a lot about produce and about cooking and since then I’ve never lost my relationship with the UK.

I also went to Alain Ducasse, to Pierre Gagnaire, Troisgros and many others, and to Ferran Adria at El Bulli who was great friends with my father. I always tried to go to places that were run very well and were successful. I learned something from all of them but Ferran Adria was very interesting. It really opened my mind because he and his brother and his team are the most imaginative you can find.

Arzak’s food is rooted in Basque tradition but it’s also about evolution and constantly moving forwards; where do you think this comes from?

It’s very difficult to describe yourself but after several years we have found a definition that approaches what we do – signature-style, Basque, evolving, avant garde and cutting edge – signature-style because you can only find these dishes at Arzak; Basque because these are the flavours that are in the Basque mind and when we cook, we cook unconsciously with these flavours; evolving, avant garde and cutting edge because we try to be up-to-date with techniques and to use techniques to go further.

Why do you think so much great cooking is coming out of the Basque region?

We are located in a place where the food is very important and nobody knows why –in recent years a lot of anthropologists have come to study this – we only know that we are in a very privileged place for the raw materials – for the seafood, for the sea, for the fish; there are a lot of farmers; there are a lot of small markets where the producers are very controlled in terms of sustainability.

There have always been a lot of great restaurants in the Basque country and it’s very important to remember that in the 70s there was a revolution called New Basque Cuisine led by my father and Pedro Subijana where they took traditional Basque dishes and modernised them and made a huge effort to educate the local people in what they were doing; and that has led directly to the great success of Basque cooking today.

How did your relationship with Ametsa at The Halkin come about?

They consulted us because they said they wanted to use our ‘Arzak Instruction’ gastronomic consulting and advice service. We studied the situation and we found that this is a very serious chain and we liked the way they worked so we decided to go ahead with the relationship.

The menus here, obviously are different than in Arzak because the head chef here, Sergio Sanz Blanco, gives it his own personal touch and it is adapted, of course, to London because there are different raw materials here.

Before we opened, Sergio went to many different markets to find the best products you can find in Britain. We were very surprised, in a good way, because all the fish you can find in Cornwall, Devon and Sussex now is fantastic. Of course we need time to settle but London is a great place to be because here you have a lot of history but also you have a lot of different cultures, so you can use lots of different spices that perhaps we wouldn’t use in San Sebastian; for us this a very interesting challenge and we are learning a lot. For example it is the grouse season here – we don’t have grouse in Spain, so it’s very interesting to take these new British ingredients and fit them into the Arzak signature style.

How did you feel when you heard the news that Ametsa with Arzak Instruction had won a Michelin star?

We were very happy and very grateful. It was completely unexpected. Above all I was delighted for the young team at Ametsa. They are very excited and motivated. They are constantly learning, adapting and applying new ideas based on feedback from guests. Sergi, who has worked with us, understands our way of cooking and transmits our personality and philosophy very well to the team in Ametsa.

Looking to the future, do you think that Arzak will continue with the next generation of children?

I want my children to do like I did, which is to choose freely. My children are eight and seven; they are very proud of the restaurant, and they show lots of interest in it like I did as a child. They come and they ask “what is this and what is this?” and they already have preferences of taste.

I’m teaching them to cook for themselves because even if they don’t join this profession I want them to be able to cook. For me cooking is always a very good skill to have – you can share it with your friends and your family and it’s very important that people should be able to cook well at home.

View recipe for Scallops with Beta-carotene here