euskalkultura.eus

Larry Wilson, San Gabriel Valley Tribune. And the people who live on the other side of the nominal national border we were rapidly approaching really consider themselves Basque before they consider themselves Spanish. They even use an entirely different name, Donostia, for the city we would be visiting for two nights, San Sebastian.

Let’s call it San Sebastian for our purposes. And let’s try to set aside the serious political issues the Basque separatists of the region have raised for many years.

But let’s acknowledge that, as we found in a short trip to the region traversing both sides of the now more or less nominal border between the big EU countries, Basques are Basque. Their country is Basque. They should, in a better world, be allowed nationhood.

They are Euskalduna, speakers of the Basque tongue, a language with no relation to the other European languages. A people genetically proven to be descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Western Europe, different from the rest.

The political issues revolving around that fact will be settled one day. Peace mostly reigns on the separatist front these days; few bombs are thrown. Our task, before heading back up to Paris for Phoebe’s college class reunion from her days at the Sorbonne, was to do a little bit of sightseeing and a lot of eating, with urban strolls and hikes in the Pyrenees to walk it all off.

The Basque cuisine is miraculous, and the people live to eat before they live to indulge in politics. San Sebastian reportedly has more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than any city in the world.

In the hills above, we would dine at one of the craziest, most ethereal restaurants in the world, the two-starred Mugaritz. In the hill town of St. Jean Pied-de-Port, nominally across the border in France, we’d have a quiet, old-fashioned meal in the restaurant of our hotel, a one-star itself, where the owner is proudly also the chef, and the bellman the waiter.

But first we would hit the tapas bars in the Old Town of San Sebastian, where the small meals currently the norm in Los Angeles were invented. In 1977, on my first post-college trip overseas, my friend Martin and I had visited these bars, where each dish, called pinxto, was the equivalent of a nickel a plate — small beers, same cost.

Now, it’s more. But not so bad.

One night we hit eight of the nine pinxto bars recommended by the fine Feed Me Phoebe website of (unrelated) author Phoebe Lapine, and it all added up to under 100 euros, including copious amounts of wine, especially the high-poured, low-alcohol Txakoli, along with plenty of apple cider.

Don’t worry — we were walking. A lot.

The Old Town is chockablock with hundreds of restaurants, where you stand instead of sit. You’re not expected to order more than a dish or two — it’s almost not worth ordering in Spanish, as servers answer in English.

We sampled gambos a la plancha in Goiz Argi, anchovy toasts with blueberry jam in Txepetxa. And anchovy savories at La Vina, where we enjoyed the famous cheesecake — sweet, but not so much so that you can’t move back to shrimp in a heartbeat.

The next day we kept breakfast and lunch light — toast and coffee, some jamon — as dinner would be at the wild Mugaritz, a taxi drive into the hills above town. This is the playground of chef Andoni Luis Aduriz, a graduate of Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli restaurant. Some say he has surpassed his master.

Here, dinner is an all-night event. You’re not going to the movies afterward. There are only 17 tables and they’re not easy to get. We changed our itinerary for a reservation, after pleasant emails over many weeks.

Mugaritz is mad. There are stones scattered across the table. You think they’re potatoes, as they sometimes are, but ours were just stones. Then there’s the meadow-grass centerpiece: a dozen baby radishes, grill-dried mussels with “home-made blue cheese veil” — it’s really a big puff of bread mold, and not bad.

Add tiger nut starch, tasting like horchata; lacquered duck neck in a short neck-shaped wooden box; beef cheeks with prune glaze and sauerkraut powder; “egg yolks tucked in with a sea urchin blanket.”

I take notes, but they’re half-nonsense. It’s the Mugaritz folks’ fault: That is their game.

“Nothing is as it seems,” I write. “Spider crab soup, ha! It’s really pumpkin soup with peanut goo.”

When I tell the waiter I’m on to his tricks, he just smiles, and invites us into the kitchen. The chef has heard my wife doesn’t care for onions, so he made a meringue-cum-macaroon out of onions. She liked it. He also made a small cake, like a ladyfinger, mostly out of pig blood. It’s an ancient taste, he says.

Back at our table, we play a guessing game. The winner gets the caviar. We also make our own melange with a mortar and pestle from saffron, corn, shiso and lard.

The wine pairings, along with one Oberhäuser Brücke wheat beer, are worth the tab in themselves. Wines ranged from old sherry to the Loire chenin blanc by Patrick Baudouin to the Morgon by Jean Foillard to the cloudy Chilean pinot noir.

The desserts — frozen airy apple chippings infused with “mature cheese,” apparently a very ripe Roquefort and a chocolate and caramel cronut — are, the waiter said, “almost impossible.”

Even hot chocolate is something else in San Sebastian. Around the corner from our pension was a superb almost Venetian cafe with flaky breads and freshly squeezed orange juice. Hitting the road, we drove to the Pyrenees and a river valley, where I wanted to fish, but trout season ends in mid-September. With no ceremony, much less a border guard, the N138 highway led us into France at the crest of a hill. We stopped in St.-Etienne-de-Baigorry, then drove to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the traditional start of the Camino de Santiago pilgrims’ hike.

Fortunately, the madness is over in October. A light rain fell as we pulled up to Hotel Les Pyrenees. A portly tall man guided us into the garage, then showed us to our room with a southern view of the border. Later that night, he was our waiter.

The fine menu by third-generation owner Philippe Arrambide is more French than Basque. But it is Basque as well, and, oh, those Irouleguy wines are superb: light, indigenous grapes, a bit of a fizz to the rosés and whites.

The next day, we hiked through the Irouleguy vineyards, past small hog farms and walnut groves, where a couple tossed us a bunch of fallen nuts to take home.

Two border collies ran by on their way toward a job involving sheep. I began to reflect on some of the Basque food we’d had that week, before we had even entered Basque country.

I can’t wait to go back to the land of the Basques. Next time, it will be in the fishing season. The Hemingway-esque trout would be nice smoked, then served with a cold Izkiriota Ttipia wine.

Larry Wilson is a member of the Los Angeles News Group editorial board.