Restaurant Review: Mugaritz
A night of nonsense that goes from licking belly buttons to playing baa-ing noises whilst eating lamb that ends with a dry whimper
This month marks ten years since I last wrote a restaurant review. I contemplated starting again two years ago because I missed writing. I didn’t miss writing restaurant reviews, I just missed writing. What stopped me was two simple things. Firstly, I kept remembering why I stopped in the first place — that reviewing restaurants sounds fun but if you do it long enough it becomes a clinical, joyless experience. But more importantly it felt like it would be punching down rather than up. Starting to review again in a post-Covid world with soaring costs and huge staffing challenges just felt wrong.
Then in early August this year, I dined at Mugaritz. I went into the experience with the same view as any regular diner — to eat in an innovative restaurant that has sat on the World’s Best Restaurant list since 2005. I left feeling like I’d just experienced everything that’s wrong with food and realised getting Forked.ie back up and running for one single review would definitely not be punching down. To review a restaurant that I’ve had on my bucket list for at least 15 years. A destination that clearly, once, was phenomenal, but today has become the epitome of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a story first published in 1837 in Fairy Tales Told For Children. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I’d asked for the children’s menu.
Let’s start with the positives, which won’t take long. The location of Mugaritz is beautiful, sitting nestled in the countryside, on the dividing line of two Basque towns — Errenteria and Astigarraga, I haven’t been as excited to eat in a restaurant in a long time. It has held two Michelin stars since 2006 and in 2023 the chef behind the iconic restaurant, Andoni Luis Aduriz, was the winner of the Icon Award by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
Standing outside in the clean country air with cattle meandering about and a slight view through a low window to a brigade of chefs working at pace was thrilling. We started with a glass of Txakolina, a local wine and the first few courses in the garden. The wines throughout the night were a treat, outmatching the food like a Heavyweight champion taking on a White Collar boxer. In particular the Jade Gross white Rioja was divine.
My dining companions had mixed experience of Michelin restaurants, one had only eaten in a one star once or twice, the other had accompanied me to noma days after it was voted the world’s best for a second time and more recently to the phenomenal two star EssZimmer in Munich. It says something that days after our meal in Mugaritz the latter asked me whether we’d now eaten in the best and worst two stars on the planet (noma, whilst number one on the World’s Best list only held two stars). The answer didn’t take long. Yes, I do believe we have.
We started with a dish of floral fingers. I’ve eaten in more than a dozen restaurants that have been in the top 20 on the World’s Top list. The first course in every single one of those had elicited a silence of incredulity. It’s one of the most beautiful moments in restaurants like this — when a sense of wonder descends on the table that something so incredible could be created safe in the knowledge it’s going to get even better. At Enrico Bartolini’s in Milan earlier this year a crab taco made me wonder if I’d ever eat anything better in my life. A beetroot soup at EssZimmer is something my tastebuds will pine for long after the day they stop functioning.
Floral fingers had us quiet for different reasons. Chloe Jade (ChloeJadeTravels) on TikTok likened this dish to eating lip gloss. I think that’s being kind. I’ve accidentally eaten lip gloss before and I’d probably try it again. You couldn’t pay me enough money to eat this again. I was quietly hoping this was just a nondescript blip, my dining companions scraping the bowl with their fingers and dipping into flowers wondering if they’d also missed something. I had spent days extolling the virtues of restaurants like this to the one person in our party who’d never experienced a Top 50 restaurant. More fool me.
Life became a little more palatable with the other dishes before we went inside, with a dish that sang fennel being one of the highlights of the evening.
I should point out that one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to eat in Mugaritz is the restaurant’s continued desire to push boundaries and be innovative. Innovation comes with mistakes and errors, it’s the only way to get to the near perfect things. So I didn’t expect to enjoy everything, in fact I knew I wouldn’t. But the next course ‘Shore: sea rush’ was the start of a stretch of madness that says the Emperor either hasn’t got anyone around him to tell him he’s no clothes on or has believed his own hype so much he believes he can put anything on a plate and people will lap it up.
The sea rush, which tends to grow in saltmarsh, was the equivalent of cutting off a wet ponytail that had just been washed in lemon scented shampoo and somehow managing to digest it.
A white tuna that followed was fine enough, but would be left on the test kitchen floor of many a Japanese restaurant. It felt like a one-two punch of something horrendous followed by something mediocre that made the latter feel better than it was.
What appears next is a thing of wonder. It is the Emperor in his birthday suit, walking through the restaurant expecting people to throw flowers and shout out how beautiful his new clothes are. We are given a belly button and told not to eat it, but lick the juices from it. It’s around this point that the mood of the room changes, it seems that most people are now starting to wonder, like the little child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, am I the only one thinking “isn’t he naked?”. The air of excitement in the room is now filled with bewilderment.
To protect the innocent, I’ve not put videos up of us trying to lick the belly button. I am still not sure what was in it. It tasted like the lovechild of nothingness and despair. A dish designed to reconnect us to the first source of food we had in life does little other than make me weep that I’ve convinced two friends to collectively spend more than €1000 on this nonsense (*see the Mugaritz definition of nonsense later in this review). I am convinced an art installation will appear later this year with a picture of every single person’s contorted face at the precise moment they realise, whilst licking misery juice from a belly button, that this is the most expensive joke they’ll ever be involved in.
Bread, Iberian ham and tomato could be mistaken for the wet towels you’re given on the table to clean your hands. Two decent bits of meat again seem better than the sum of their parts because they’re surrounded by such utter mediocrity. At the start of our meal we’re told that most dishes will be eaten by hand like it’s a new thing and not something many cultures around the world still do. Temperatures are also apparently a big thing. The only time I experienced that across the 23 courses was one of the few times we got cutlery and the fork was hotter than the food. The last course of the images above was called ‘Summer Costume’, maybe they’re genuinely trying to recreate the Emperor’s New Clothes. Though the tomato was enjoyable.
There’s a German word — verschlimmbesserung — that essentially means attempted improvement that just makes things worse. Most of our meal screams verschlimmbesserung, albeit there are times when it’s hard to know what the restaurant is actually trying to improve. A case in point is the multiple ‘double dishes’ — two dishes served at the same time with matching wine pairings. It’s just being different for difference sake.
On one occasion wine glasses are put the opposite way around for one guest causing complete confusion for our whole table as to which wine is with which dish. Attention to detail in a two star should be ingrained.
Chicken with almonds will go down as one of the worst dishes I’ve ever paid for and I say that as someone who was once served months old sun-dried tomatoes in Malta so rancid I ran to the restaurant’s bathroom to throw up.
Extra chalky almonds dropped into a slightly more liquid Knorr stock pot is probably the simplest way to describe a dish that I struggled to eat, keeping going in the hope that it would somehow get better. Spoiler alert… every mouthful made me sadder.
Hanami, named after the Japanese custom of enjoying the beauty of flowers was by far the prettiest dish on the table that evening (and their own photo does it much more justice than my iPhone). I can’t say much other than meh because at this point in the meal, we’d moved on through the stages of grief to acceptance that this experience would be something we’d laugh about for years to come because it was so bad.
A ‘Pinenut nougat’ was delicious, the other three dishes above a mixture of more mediocrity verging on the tasteless aside from decent crustaceans whose bed, however, was as disgusting as the ocean floor they tend to scavenge for food.
It appeared that finally serving some decent food couldn’t be allowed to go unchecked. When a delightful dish of Lamb skin was brought down, the room had begun to enter into a stage of weird delirium when people were asked to scan a QR code, which brought them to this page, allowing them to press a button to make baa noises.
The meal’s final dish was titled ‘Sweet churro’. The only thing sweet about it was this was the last dish. I suppose it finished a hideous experience that had started with lip balm, with a perfect sense of sun-dried confusion. At this point we were laughing with a giddiness that only comes from the knowledge that something terrible is nearly over. After somehow eating the dried plantain, we’re offered coffee. We decline, like many in the room, wanting to simply get out of an experiment that couldn’t have gone more awry.
Whilst we worry about how long our taxi will take, one of the waiting staff asks for our opinion in a way that screams a narcissist demanding you “tell me how fucking incredible I am” (no slight on the waiter, it’s clearly a requirement to ask us). Two of us begin to look to the tablecloth, the third mumbles the wine was good. I am worried if I start giving feedback I’ll still be there the next day. And, frankly, I feel bad enough that front of house staff have to serve these dishes on a daily basis as well as deal with the fallout. The TikTok I mentioned earlier also apparently shows the police being called due to a diner not willing to pay their bill.
The feedback from Mugaritz seems to be that not everyone will like every dish, that some can be an acquired taste. I agree. I am also of the opinion that the world would be a much duller place without chefs like Andoni Luis Aduriz and their vision to innovate the world of food.
Unfortunately 2024 Mugaritz has swallowed itself so far up its own hype pipe, it’s oozing back out its own inedible belly button. That’s reflected by a look at TripAdvisor… I know… not a great barometer for restaurants, but it’s at least got data. In 2024 so far there’s not been a 4 or 3 star rating. There has been four 5 star ratings. There has also been one 2 star rating and eleven 1 star ratings. Some 68.75% of reviews so far this year have been one star. If we go back to 2023, where there’s a full year picture, it’s not dissimilar when 61.36% of reviews given were 1 star ratings and 18.18% giving a 5 star review. I say this merely to point out that by far the majority of diners since 2023 have not enjoyed this restaurant. Taking reviews in 2023 and 2024 into account, 73.33% of diners have rated Mugaritz a 1 or 2 out of 5.
A little yellow book given at the start of the dinner with phrases that have come from the team and previous diners, is a fascinating read. The phrase nonsense according to the book is ‘a mindless opinion’, which, of course is itself the definition of nonsense.
It seems like Aduriz and his team have gone so far into the world of innovation that they’ve forgotten that no matter how different they want to be, the food still needs to taste good (or of something, at least). Should an innovative 23-course meal have dishes you don’t enjoy or makes you question or think? Yes, it always should. Should it have three quarters of a meal that is at best sub-Michelin Bib Gourmand par, hell no.
So I leave you with my favourite from Mugaritz’s little yellow book — Complexity: ‘sea inhabited by fish unaware of what water is’. It seems to me that Mugaritz has become that fish.
