The chef is sticking his head out of the hedge. He has a knife and fork in his hand, a napkin round his neck and a mischievous grin on his face. If you had only seen the austerity of his food, the astonishing level of technique in his cooking or even been one of the people lucky enough to eat at Mugaritz (of which more later), you might have missed the playfulness that makes Andoni Luis Aduriz maybe the most interesting – as well as number three – cook in the world.
He wasn't meant to be such a success. For a chef who has two scientists attached to his kitchen, with a lab responsible for some of the most revolutionary advances in food, Aduriz only started cooking because he'd spectacularly flunked school. At 14, he'd failed all his classes, he'd failed at sport, he'd failed religious studies, and as he says with his beguiling giggle: "In Spain, not even Satan could fail religion."
Culinary school didn't go well either, at first. True to form, he flunked his first year and had to repeat. After all, he was only there because his mother, who had faced long periods of starvation after the Spanish civil war, "thought I was trouble and needed to work with my hands not my head. She said that at least if I could cook I would eat."
It all changed, of course, when at 16 he saw what chefs outside his hometown of San Sebastián were doing. He devoured magazines. A burning passion was ignited. For the first time he had a hunger to study, to work hard, to express himself through food.
And then he met Ferran Adrià.
Aduriz becomes boyish when he talks speedily, excitedly, about how El Bulli changed his life. "It was a magical place for me," he says, "incredible! I worked like a dog but I was lucky enough to be in the creativity station." This was 93, 94. El Bulli was on the cusp of becoming the powerhouse we now know. "Sometimes at service there would be zero customers but we knew what we were doing was right."
Aduriz had finally found his voice. "When you decide the direction you will take, what you are going to do, it is not easy," he says. "On one side, you have what your guests demand, what your family wants from you, what everyone expects. On the other, there is only your belief in what you should be doing."
When I spoke to Adrià at one of El Bulli's last suppers last summer it was clear their mutual respect continues. When I asked who would now be the best chef in the world, he loyally cites his brother Albert, and then Andoni Luis Aduriz.
"At the beginning of Mugaritz, too, people didn't come," Aduriz shyly smiles. "But if success had come in the early years there would not have been time to go outside to the mountains, to study our environment, to build this connection to the place."
To understand more about the "place", the misty, mountainous, eucalyptus-lined area around San Sebastián, to where Aduriz returned after leaving El Bulli, he has organised a food tour of some favourite places. My first stop, the best fish restaurant in the region, maybe the world: Elkano in the small seaside town of Getaria. My guides: Oswaldo and Ramon from the Mugaritz research department. We are all excited. First, sublime slippery roe from the blue mackerel fished in the bay outside. Clams from the chargrill. No dressing or adornment, to be eaten naked, sucked from the shell. Next, a Basque speciality: hake throat, steamed, grilled, or served in green sauce. White fish on a white plate, seasoned only with salt. It is here my readings from Aduriz's book Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking, kick in. There, he says: "We will create a space where hake's very soft voice can be perceived and appreciated… some of the most prized ingredients in our culture have very little flavour: elvers, hake cheeks, dwarf peas are essentially about texture."
When the throat slides down my own, I begin to understand another Mugaritz mantra: you don't have to like something to like it.
Hake throat is perhaps the most gelatinous mouthfeel I have ever experienced: saline, almost unmentionable, it might be Japanese. Steamed throat coated in gloopy green sauce, though, is almost a gag-reflex too far.
Perhaps oddly, this is followed by the best fish I have ever eaten. Whole local turbot rubbed in salt and grilled over coals, placed like an upended turtle in the centre of the table to be shared. Everyone is given something of everything: crispy, sticky fins to eat with sticky fingers; soft skull to be mined with your tongue for marrow; luscious cheeks, teaspoons of viscous gelatine; dense and perfectly pitched fillet, tasting only of itself and the sea outside. For dessert: chalky sheep's milk wobbly with rennet served in a china jug, another symphony of white on white.
Aduriz joins us for our next stop, Saturday night at a cider house, cider being the wine of the poor in the Basque. A call comes out as a tap is opened from a long line of 1,000-litre barrels. A thin stream of cider spills on to the stone floor. We line up to loop our glasses through it. Our evening is punctuated by delicate bacalao omelette, confit cod, huge chargrilled steaks on the bone. No garnish. Again, every dish is placed into the middle of the group and shared. Aduriz cuts the meat, spoons the fish, serves. As the evening wears on and more cider barrels are opened, our neighbours open up, too. Losing their reserve, they crowd around their local hero, taking photos together, talking.
Sunday lunch in the centre of San Sebastián. Some of the Mugaritz team are cooking for us at an ancient gastronomic society in the atmospheric old town full of moody, narrow passages packed with pintxo (Basque tapas) bars. No women are allowed in the kitchen, or even allowed in the building after lunch. Long tables are filled with families animatedly chattering, laughing and eating while their men prepare the food. Ours is no fine-dining Mugaritz meal, but immaculate ingredients cooked brilliantly. Melting bonito belly with spring onions and pickled chillies; shimmering salty anchovies; unctuous sea urchins from Galicia; "snow" mushrooms, startling black and white, otherworldly, the kind of fungus you were warned not to eat as a child; heart-stopping bloody steak. All the while Aduriz serves. We drink local wine, cider (only I touch water) and talk.
He tells me a story from the book about another of his food heroes, Michel Bras, and a rabbit. How Bras was taught that to become a great chef he had to master classic lapin chasseur (a hunters' rabbit stew in brown sauce), with every ingredient and method strictly codified. About how Bras "didn't see himself in this rabbit", how he felt it compared poorly to the dish his mother made with just the lapin, two cloves of garlic, a tomato, a dash of white wine, a sprig of thyme. Bras's direction clashed head-on with the demands of French haute cuisine. His restaurant was empty. His wife pleaded with him to compromise. Eventually, after a long and difficult journey, French cuisine capitulated and Bras was recognised as one of his country's most influential chefs.
There is much here that mirrors Aduriz's own story. The first years of Mugaritz saw few customers, which, perhaps strangely, only confirmed the young team in its belief. The mood in 90s cuisine was for many gaudy ingredients in contrast to Aduriz's belief in paring a dish to its essentials.
"Michel's Bras's plates are a riot, expansive, easily understood," he says. "Here, people are private. They mind their own business, they are very reserved. The food is like that, too. It's naked. A fish throat appears on a plate, on its own, nothing else. At Mugaritz, also, we look for the least amount of ingredients, to see whether it can work with less.
"One of my favourite dishes is our 'edible stones'. It looks like a stone, feels like a stone, your brain is telling you you will lose teeth if you eat it. But it melts away in your mouth. A poetry, a magical equilibrium of texture and temperature is achieved with a single potato. "When you go to culinary school," he smiles, "you are taught food must be pleasing, but when you get to Mugaritz, you realise that sometimes you need to be disturbed, to be shocked." You don't have to like something to like it.
It was through Bras that I first met Aduriz and Oswaldo, when I foolishly volunteered to work the vegetable station at a meal orchestrated by Noma's René Redzepi which included feeding many of the world's top chefs. We divided into 10 teams, the Japanese working with shellfish, meat left in the capable hands of pork bun master David Chang, desserts by the brilliant Ben Shewry of Melbourne's Attica, etc. Vegetables were bossed by Michel Bras.
The sun shone, the champagne flowed and my mountain of cavalo nero remained half a metre high. Chef had asked that I strip the kale's fine centre stems by hand (potato peelers too common, apparently). I struggled on. There were crates of corn and leeks to trim and grill, sacks of baby celeriac and beetroot to peel and steam, giant bowls of pickles to prepare. Chef was concerned. I was panicked.
Then, magically, two quiet young men appeared at our station and instantly everything changed. The food mountains diminished, service got back on track and the great and good were well fed with dishes worthy of the finest vegetable cook there has ever been. Like being rescued by Messi and Ronaldo coming off the subs' bench in extra time in a European final.
Aduriz laughs loudly when I remind him. "It was the worst possible table to be at," he grins. "People getting drunk. Michel Bras suffering. The vegetables were too many. So we decided, OK, let's help there."
Monday morning. Mugaritz. The restaurant is closed till the end of April but the brigade is working on creating this year's menu. In 2011 they served 98 different dishes to guests and 2012 is likely to be around the same. The kitchen looks like the command centre for an invasion. On one wall, the 20-plate menu with many empty spaces. On another, a mood board of sketches of dishes to be devised. I am intrigued by the one entitled "nostalgia".
I ask Oswaldo what it will mean. "Nostalgia is a dish that will disappear in front of you," he says. "It is about memory, loss, emotion. It may be an alphabet, a soap bar, an ice cream, a cookie, but it will be universal whether you are from the UK or Peru." Clearly, it's work in progress.
On the pass, I watch as strips of fine white paste dipped in milk and salt are wrapped around winter herbs. I taste pieces of mascarpone rolled in kaolin clay – delicious, dry, redolent of cinnamon.
We head upstairs to the development kitchen to see experimental dishes closer to being realised. The room is kitted like an operating theatre with a large, sliding steel table and lab beakers of brightly coloured liquids. The first, an astonishing grassy colour, is an essence of capsicum, like eating raw green pepper without chewing. I taste intense apple juices clarified by bacillus enzymes. Ramon glazes the herb ravioli in a duck reduction, the pasta now soft, pillowy, elusive, the salad inside seemingly untouched by heat. "You will feel the textures better in spring," says Aduriz, "there will be more subtlety."
"This is another plate we are working on that is purely visual," he grins as Oswaldo hands me a curved aluminium dish shaped like a slice of fossilised pumpkin, holding cubes of a volcanic cake. "Aluminium keeps cold like china holds heat," he says. "The technique is not the most important." The cake evaporates in my mouth.
We try "cheese" made with milk skin from seeds; delicate white "hair" fashioned from sugar and starch dipped in bitter green tea powder. The team makes a meringue from milk without using eggs or sugar. We taste slices of ibérico and beef treated with aluminium silicate to accelerate the ageing process. A little confused by this assault on my senses, I watch a video of chefs dressed in animal suits being arrested as "wild plant terrorists" to fight a temporary Spanish ban on foraging and to poke fun at themselves. Laughing, Aduriz puts on his panda head and takes us outside.
He wants to show us a nearby cave where neolithic human remains and tools were found in the 70s. He is convinced the bones may contain his mother's DNA. He bounds up the gorge like a mountain goat, stooping to pick meadow herbs on the way. He tells me he's had thank you letters from Mugaritz guests analysed. Experiences, memories and emotions come out top and unusually for a restaurant ranked number three in the 2011 S Pellegrino list of the world's 50 best restaurants, mentions of food only come in at number 13. But then, as he says in the book, for him: "Cooking isn't, wasn't, and will not be enough."
I resolve to return in early summer to explore what I feel for myself. To discover how the concept dishes evolved, to eat a magical edible stone, to taste the de-natured, re-natured food from this remarkable man and extraordinary cook. Meanwhile, there is an OFM photo shoot, a panda suit and a hedge to push a chef's head through.
Special thanks to Oswaldo Oliva
zelaia.es. For more on the Basque region, contact the Spanish Tourist Office, 00800 1010 5050, spaininfo@tourspain.es
• This article was amended on 18 March 2012. In the original version, Andoni Luis Aduriz's name was misspelt as Arduriz. This has been corrected.
