Bodegón Alejandro

Section 1·A Bodegón

Bodegón Alejandro, a casual restaurant in the old town of San Sebastián. I went looking for somewhere decent for dinner, not at Michelin star level, and this is what I found. It is listed in the Michelin Guide without a star, and it is known for a tasting menu at a reasonable fifty-eight euros a head.

The name gives away the character of the house. Bodegón in Spanish originally means a plain tavern or eating house that sells drink and food. So it was never a place that set out to be fine dining; the name carries the identity of a casa de comidas, a neighbourhood place where people gather to eat and drink. It is still listed in the Michelin Guide as traditional cuisine, without a star.

Section 2·Where the First Star Was

But it is not that this house never had one. In 1986 it took one Michelin star. And the person who took it was Martín Berasategui. The first Michelin star of his life came out of this basement restaurant.

Berasategui was born in San Sebastián in 1960, and the restaurant was already open when he was born. His parents and his aunt ran it, and before that the family had a butcher's shop just nearby at the La Bretxa market. His father, Martín senior, was a butcher and handled the grill in the restaurant, while the centre of the kitchen was his mother Gabriela Olazábal and his aunt María. He names these two women repeatedly as his first teachers.

His account of his childhood is fairly specific. After school he came not home but to the restaurant, and twenty-three steps down into the basement was a kitchen running on a coal range. Around the age of seventeen he lived here to the point of putting a bed under the stairs. He later called this restaurant his university.

Section 3·France on Days Off

What he learned, though, was not only the Basque home cooking of his mother and his aunt. From fifteen to twenty-seven, on his days off, he crossed the border into France. He studied pastry with Jean Paul Heinard in Bayonne and again with André Mandion in Anglet, learned charcuterie from François Brouchican in Ustaritz, came into contact with haute cuisine through Didier Oudill, who had come from Michel Guérard's Les Prés d'Eugénie, and later reached Alain Ducasse at Le Louis XV in Monaco.

In 1981, at twenty-one, he took charge of this kitchen. There is a story attached. He needed a loan to renovate the place, but the bank would not give one without his parents standing as guarantors, and since he did not want to drag them into it he was refused. A shepherd who supplied the restaurant with vegetables and sheep's milk heard about the situation and offered to guarantee it himself, taking him by the hand to the bank branch. The renovation done, three years later in 1986, this house took one Michelin star.

Section 4·A Training Ground

Where Bodegón Alejandro today holds almost strictly to traditional Basque cooking, the atmosphere in the 1980s and 90s under Berasategui appears to have been rather different. David de Jorge later recalled visiting at seventeen while at culinary school, saying that the house already had its star and was doing cooking nobody else was doing, cooking that looked to him almost like science fiction. Berasategui saw that eagerness and invited him to come into the kitchen at weekends. So this was not simply a traditional restaurant but a testing ground where Basque recipes met technique picked up in France.

For that reason this kitchen also served as a training ground for Spanish cooks through the 1980s and 90s. David de Jorge started here, Iñigo Urrechu began under Berasategui at seventeen and later rose to be his head chef, and Nandu Jubany, after passing through Arzak, is said to have worked here with Berasategui and learned what a gastronomic restaurant means.

Section 5·Two Days Before Lasarte

That background was, in truth, half the reason I chose this place for dinner. Two days later I had a reservation at the three star Martín Berasategui in Lasarte-Oria. So the order became: eat first at the basement eating house where the Spanish chef with more Michelin stars than any other won his first, then go two days later to where he stands now.

So the order became: eat first at the basement eating house where the Spanish chef with more Michelin stars than any other won his first, then go two days later to where he stands now.

One thing to be clear about is that Berasategui is said to have no connection to this restaurant now. In 1993 he opened a restaurant under his own name in Lasarte-Oria with his wife Oneka Arregui, and from 1996 to 2009 he was involved through a group in this house among other operations. But in 2009, when Andoni Luis Aduriz and the businessman Bixente Arrieta acquired part of that group, ownership of Mugaritz and Bodegón Alejandro passed to IXO Grupo. Which is to say the people running this house now are the Mugaritz side. Two lineages that between them represent modern Basque cooking run on inside the history of one restaurant on one narrow street, and a place with that shape is a rare thing. The kitchen has been led by Iñaki Salvador since around 2019, the same person on my visit in September 2023 and still now.

Section 6·À la Carte

That day I had been up very early to travel from Barcelona to San Sebastián, and the check-in at the accommodation took a long time, so I was not in great condition. Above all a late lunch had not gone down yet. Frankly I did not think anything so wonderful was going to come out of the course here, so I decided to order à la carte rather than the tasting menu.

The carte came in three parts: starters, mains and a seasonal special. For the starter I ordered Spider Crab stew Donostian Style and for the main a Grilled hanger Steak, one each, and since there was a Donostia mushroom dish among the seasonal specials at a decent price, I ordered that too.

Section 7·Mushrooms in September

I found out afterwards, at a Korean restaurant in Madrid, when I mentioned I had been to Donostia, that the Korean owner told me it is the region in Spain where the mushrooms are good. So that is why there was a mushroom dish here, I thought, and ever since I have tried to seek out good mushroom dishes each time I visit San Sebastián.

That is also why mushrooms were in the seasonal column. This place repeatedly emphasises local seasonal produce, with anchovies and bonito, squid and tomato and green chilli at the centre in summer, and artichoke and wild mushrooms, truffle from Álava and game in winter. Rather than a house that repeats a signature all year round, the market and the season come first and the menu follows. September, where I went, was somewhere on that border.

The first thing I ordered once seated was a sparkling wine. Sumarroca Brut 2021, a cava from Penedès. I had come up from Barcelona that morning, so my first glass turned out to be a wine from just outside the Barcelona I had left. Sumarroca sits in Subirats, south of Barcelona, on poor limestone soils scattered with gravel where the Garraf mountains strip the moisture out of the sea breeze, and the whole estate is farmed organically now.

The Brut Reserva puts a little Chardonnay, under seven percent, over cava's indigenous trio of Macabeo, Xarel·lo and Parellada, and rests at least twenty months on the lees. Cava as a drink began in 1872, when Josep Raventós came back from Champagne and made the first second fermentation in the bottle in Penedès, so the method is the same as champagne and only the grapes are Catalan.

The mushroom dish arrived first, various roasted mushrooms with a soft-boiled egg on top. I broke the egg and ate it with the sautéed mushrooms, and the aroma of mushroom came through strongly with good texture. It was not at the level of thinking I had never tasted anything like this, though. It tasted like something you could make well enough with Korean mushrooms.

The egg sat over the top rather than beside it.

Section 8·Txangurro

While waiting for the crab after the mushrooms I ordered a glass of white. Valserrano Blanco 2022. It is made by Viñedos y Bodegas de la Marquesa in Villabuena de Álava in Rioja Alavesa, a house founded during the period when French négociants fleeing phylloxera poured into Rioja in the late nineteenth century. The starting point was the Marquis of Solana, Francisco Javier Solano y Eulate, who began making Médoc style wines on the advice of the French winemaker Jean Pinaud, and the same family runs it today, led by his great-grandson Juan Pablo de Simón.

They make around four hundred thousand bottles from a little over seventy hectares in family ownership. The Blanco uses Viura, the backbone of white Rioja, and the 2022 was pale gold with clear aromas of fennel and basil and new-mown hay. It only occurred to me afterwards, but Álava is one of the three Basque provinces, so I had drunk the Basque side of Rioja in a Basque restaurant.

Then the Spider Crab Stew arrived. Not an actual crab shell but a shell-shaped vessel, inside it a sauce made from the meat and the innards, with cream cooked into a foam on top. This one was good. What I especially liked was that the crab meat was already picked and sitting there ready, and the sauce tasted fine too. What was a shame was the cream foam, and whether it added anything to the taste at all. Even so, eating crab someone else had picked for me at a European restaurant at a not unreasonable price made this a satisfying dish.

Looking into it afterwards, this pairing was an inevitable one in San Sebastián. The words Donostian Style on the menu are not a decorative epithet. Txangurro a la donostiarra is one of the classic dishes that represent San Sebastián, and the traditional method is to pick the meat of the spider crab, cook it with the flavours of onion and tomato, then return it to the shell. What I liked about the meat sitting picked in a shell-shaped vessel was precisely the original form of this dish.

And the cream foam on top was most likely a pil-pil foam. Pil-pil is a sauce emblematic of Basque cooking, made by emulsifying olive oil with the gelatine that comes out of salt-cured cod, and this house modernises the traditional txangurro slightly by laying that pil-pil over it as a foam. So the foam I wondered about turned out to be the single point where this house had laid a hand on the traditional dish.

So the foam I wondered about turned out to be the single point where this house had laid a hand on the traditional dish.

Section 9·Onglet

Last came the Hanger Steak. What is a hanger steak, I wondered, and looking it up it seems to be named after the good cuts butchers hang up for steak in the shop.

To set the cut down more precisely, hanger steak is what the French call onglet, the muscle that hangs from the diaphragm of the animal. The hanger in the name comes not from meat hung in a butcher's shop but from hanging off the diaphragm. Only five to seven hundred grams come off a single animal, so butchers used to keep it rather than sell it, which is where the nickname butcher's steak came from.

In Britain the cut is indeed called skirt, but in Korean butchery terms it is closer to tosisal. The grain is coarse and it has spring to it, so the meat aroma comes up strongly, and what I felt as chewy with the juices bursting out is exactly the character of this cut.

Personally this was among the best beef I have eaten. The tosisal was chewy while the juices burst out of it, and it was so good. I do not know how it was cooked but the outside was browned beautifully. The seasoning was right, and if I had to name a fault the garlic sauce that came with it did not seem to suit it well. This steak alone was good enough that it could have taken a Michelin star.

Looking back, it may be no accident that the grilled meat was the best thing here. What the family did before opening this restaurant was run a butcher's shop, and Berasategui's father, a butcher, handled the grill in this kitchen. The owner and the chef have both changed since, but the fact that grilling meat sits at the origin of this house has not.

Section 10·Cola in San Sebastián

Was it from about this point that I went around Spain drinking five cans of cola a day? I was tired that day, and after eating a steak I was suddenly hit by richness and thirst. Do they even sell cola at a dining restaurant like this, I wondered, and asked, and they said they did, so I ordered one. Being a restaurant, the cola came served nicely too. So I ordered another on the way out, two in all, and from that point I think I was drinking five to ten cans of cola a day. Spanish cooking uses a lot of olive oil and had a richness to it for me.

The good news is that back in Korea I went back to drinking it occasionally as before. It seems to have been the weight of the richness that kept building as I went on to southern Spain and hotter places after San Sebastián.

Section 11·The Old Town

At the end they give you a charming little wooden barrel, and opening it there are cookies and madeleines in two compartments, which was lovely. It was a restaurant with a point of its own. In San Sebastián, the centre and the concentration of famous pintxo bars are in the old town, while the famous Michelin star restaurants are out on the edges. Since you cannot only go to pintxo bars in the old town, this seems a good place to have a course or a decent à la carte dish at a reasonable price.

This restaurant still uses the condition of being a basement space as it is, and it has put the city of Donostia into the interior quite deliberately. Bertsolaris who sing improvised verse, the drummers of the San Sebastián Tamborrada, fishermen and Basque stone-lifting athletes appear as decorative motifs. And on the wall is the history of the city burning in 1813. On 31 August that year, British and Portuguese allied forces attacked a San Sebastián held by the French, and much of the city was destroyed by fire afterwards; the street called the 31st of August in today's old town takes its name from that.

That they went to the trouble of putting this story on the wall, and that I put it in this review, is because the cooking here is not simply Basque food but food tied to the memory of this city, and that is worth leaving in our memory too.