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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAll my life, I've followed the food. The French proclaimed their passion for Lyon, so there I went, for fish wrapped in bacon and for tripe never-ending ways. To Chile for oysters, Bologna for lasagna, Hong Kong for fish so alive I watched as they died on my plate. I ignored the indignity and endured the indigestion when Los Angeles was momentarily anointed culinary capital of the United States. Like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to beat against the winds, I've traveled endlessly, hoping to come upon a land that would fulfill my gastronomic fantasies. Always it was worth the voyage, whatever I found.\n\nThe Spanish stayed strangely quiet, even a decade or so ago, when tapas became fashionable and New Yorkers were content, ever so briefly, to dine standing up. A few years back, word spread from chef to chef that a genius near Barcelona was making food that foamed, but still Spain didn't step forth. The truth was that none of us really understood Spanish food, except for paella, which reminded me of saffron-laced leftovers. I wasn't really interested, not if I had to elbow my way through a Wall Street bar crowd to get a shriveled olive and a shaving of ham, not if I sneezed at the dinner table and my entire meal blew away.\n\nThen, not long ago, I heard about a Spanish city called San Sebasti\u00E1n, and I made my way there. I found a Belle Epoque paradise by the Atlantic Ocean, cool enough to make dining conditions just right. It had white-painted filigreed lampposts and a carousel with snarling wooden horses and four particular restaurants that had amassed considerable acclaim. And when I came home, I had this to say about San Sebasti\u00E1n: So this is where it is.\n\n\n\nThere was a drawback: they assassinate journalists there. San Sebasti\u00E1n is the foremost city of the Basques, a semiautonomous people who reside on both sides of the Pyrenees, a few 100,000 in France and a few million in Spain. Least accommodating among these industrious people are those belonging to a terrorist organization known as the ETA, which translates as Basque Homeland and Freedom. On my last day in San Sebasti\u00E1n, the ETA shot and killed an unsympathetic local journalist as he was walking across a parking lot. At the tourist office, I was told not to worry, because foreign food writers are not among the group's targets.\n\nWhen the terrorists keep their distance, San Sebasti\u00E1n (or, more officially, Donastia\u2014 San Sebasti\u00E1n, which is the name in both Basque and Spanish) offers an unmatched combination of beauty, graciousness and culinary enterprise. Located a forty-five-minute drive south of the French city of Biarritz, San Sebasti\u00E1n is a seaside resort that favors the well-bred over the well-tanned. It does not embrace sweat and suntan lotion, nor is it overly enamored of the insouciant pleasures obtainable at the whitewashed, sun-bleached resorts across the border and up the coast. Many of its graceful buildings are constructed of sandstone quarried from one of the three lofty hills that frame the city. It has a lovely curving beach seemingly copied from tropical brochures, but San Sebasti\u00E1n is far from torrid. The beaches seem chaste, even when the women go topless\u2014or perhaps it's just me, unmoved by Basques in the buff.\n\nThe four restaurants in and near the city are Arzak, Mart\u00EDn Berasategui, Akela're and Zuberoa. Inspired by shared ambition, wonderful offshore fishing, Basque gastronomic traditions and proximity to France's culinary expertise, these establishments have transformed San Sebasti\u00E1n into an unrivaled dining destination. What makes this accomplishment so stunning is that it has taken place in Spain, which has none of the advantages of France or Italy. Few tourists turn to Spanish travel brochures when they're deciding where to eat.\n\nSpanish food has no hold over us. The few upscale Spanish restaurants that open in America are generally dour and unsatisfying and evoke no mourning when they close. We have always given the French considerable leeway\u2014bloated goose liver, anyone?\u2014but to most of us Spanish food is weird: The sausages are a scary red, the ham isn't cooked, the cod is salted, and the white wine isn't Chardonnay. Desserts tend toward variations on the theme of curdled milk, often from ewes. Although we've allowed goats into our lives, we're still a little wary of sheep.\n\nThe movement credited with civilizing Basque cuisine and helping create world-class restaurants in San Sebasti\u00E1n is nouvelle cuisine. This scorned '70s cooking trend began in France but faded away once French chefs realized that reducing portion sizes, simplifying presentations and eliminating butter and cream was not what their proud and portly clients had in mind. Even the benefits of nouvelle cuisine\u2014freshness, lightness and harmony\u2014were slow to catch on, so eager were the French to rid their nation of this gastronomic plague.\n\nAlthough a disaster in the country of its creation, nouvelle cuisine was ideally suited to taming the rustic cooking of the Basque Country. Freshness was already a priority there. Butter and cream were not. It took little for nouvelle cuisine to triumph. Led by Juan Mari Arzak of the restaurant Arzak, the founder of nueva cocina vasca, or new Basque cuisine, the chefs of the region thrived under nearly foolproof guidelines. They had more good fortune, for their reeducation occurred at a time when the world was seeking good health through olive oil, one of the basics of Basque cooking.\n\n\n\nOn my first night in san Sebasti\u00E1n, I went to Arzak to dine alone. Seated at the next table was a French couple. She introduced herself as a magistrate in Paris, her husband as an ecutive with an Italian clothing firm. She was slim, attractive, a little tough. When she blinked, her eyes flicked like guillotines.\n\nParisians do not ordinarily cultivate the company of Americans, but I soon learned why I had become a figure of fascination to her. She had seen me surreptitiously taking notes and was interested in my reaction to the meal. More to the point, she wished to tell me hers. All three of us had ordered the identical tasting menu.\n\nI was so happy, I was grinning like a tourist in short pants who has climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The trio of amuse-gueules, the first food I had ever eaten in Spain, was stunning. Leading off was a forkful of blood sausage wrapped in a leaf. I usually despise blood sausage, all fat and pig's blood, but this was sweet and creamy, as though foie gras had crept inside. There was a timbale of cream-of-leek soup that tasted like roasted leeks and, finally, some tiny potato pancakes made from potato mousse. These were so airy they vanished the second I bit into them, as though they were made of foam, but they were not. I don't want to give the impression that Arzak is one of those foamy Spanish restaurants we've been hearing so much about.\n\nMy first course was called a potato \"accordion,\" a fan of thinly sliced potatoes, soft on the inside and crisp outside. It came with prawns that had the succulence of langoustines and the crunch of rock shrimp. The products were exquisite, my pleasure immediate.\n\nThe magistrate leaned toward me, set me straight. \"Too much oil,\" she announced.\n\nWhile it is impossible to truly understand the French, their eccentricities are obvious. Arzak has received a top rating of three stars from the Michelin guide, and the French love to travel to three-star restaurants outside France to prove to themselves they are inferior to three-star restaurants within France. Arzak's closeness to the French border puts it in a perilous position, like a cavalry post within striking distance of Apache territory. She was not wrong about the potato accordion, but whether the food was generously lavished with oil or thoughtlessly overwhelmed with oil was a matter of judgment. I suggested to her that the French use as much butter as the Spanish use oil, but butter is easier to disguise. My insight had no effect.\n\nNext came monkfish with tomato vinaigrette. \"Look!\" I proclaimed. \"No oil.\" At that moment, as though cruelly scripted, a waitress in a severe black maidservant's dress\u2014pretty standard attire for the stiff, unsmiling women who work in San Sebasti\u00E1n's restaurants\u2014appeared with a gravy boat of vinaigrette and poured most of it over my fish. The magistrate nodded her head, smiling in triumph. I whispered \"Touch\u00E9,\" hoping to impress her with my command of French.\n\nI think I understood the chef 's extravagance. In Spanish cooking, olive oil signifies hospitality, a sharing of the wealth of the land. In some ways, this emplifies the charm of Arzak, a restaurant modern in portion sizes and technique but old-fashioned in spirit.\n\nSince this was the first Spanish restaurant I'd ever visited, I was less certain of my reaction to its appearance. Outside, Arzak was unimpressive, taking up the first two floors of an unexceptional tile-roofed building located on a road leading to the suburbs. Inside, the chairbacks had a Moorish swirl and the chandeliers were all curves and whorls, but the long dark sideboard and the correctness of the service reminded me of the ageless haute bourgeois establishments I'd happily visited in countless French cities and towns. When I expressed this fond sentiment to Madame Magistrate, she told me I was mistaken, that Arzak wasn't middle-class French at all. I didn't know if this was an honest disagreement or if she just enjoyed telling me I was wrong.\n\nBy this time, the magistrate, her husband and I were in sync, our food arriving at the same time. The pigeon, we agreed, was exquisite, blood rare with the gaminess of a wild bird, yet tender as a farm-raised squab. The hostess asked me\u2014but not them\u2014if I wished to try the saut\u00E9ed foie gras, and the magistrate accused me of purposely doing a terrible job of concealing my notebook so I would be lavished with complimentary food. The foie gras, which I consumed quickly and guiltily, was properly silken. Then the waitress brought out a tray with six entr\u00E9es on it, clearly destined for another table, and the magistrate said, rather crankily, \"Are those for you, too?\"\n\nOur dessert of roasted fruit came with sabayon, so much of the light custard that I inadvertently dipped the sleeve of my suit jacket in it. I made certain my new acquaintance did not notice, because she would surely have blamed this sweetheart of a restaurant. I watched as she requested matches for her after-dinner cigarette, and a nervous waitress brought her three bos.\n\n\"Very generous,\" I said.\n\n\"They did not light it for me,\" she complained.\n\n\n\nHistorically, San Sebasti\u00E1n is famous for burning to the ground. Incineration is a fate that frequently befalls metropolitan areas located close to the border separating unfriendly countries, and Spain and France were a testy pair. The city burned about a dozen times, the most recent inferno occurring on August 31, 1813, when only one street survived. It was renamed 31 de Agosto, and each year on that date city residents march there with lighted candles, a rather perverse commemorative gesture. After the last fire, the city fathers decided to rebuild the city out of stone and wisely chose Paris as their model.\n\nSan Sebasti\u00E1n's old city, located adjacent to the harbor, was the only city until the mid-nineteenth century. Today it is mostly bars selling tapas, the snacks that have come to symbolize an insouciant Spanish way of life. Indeed, the Spanish do possess an innate ability to stagger from tapas bar to tapas bar, snacking and drinking, until they finally muster up the determination to go out for a well-deserved 11 P.M. dinner. Through it all, they remain thin, something those of us cursed with an inferior American metabolism cannot do. I tried about a dozen tapas bars, avoiding the ones patronized by fierce old Basque gentlemen in their characteristic black berets arguing fiercely among themselves in an unfathomable language so ambiguous in origin some theorize a link to the lost continent of Atlantis. (Inasmuch as nobody has ever found Atlantis, I have no idea how this conclusion was drawn.) I also skipped the ones where old Basque dogs stood in doorways, glaring distrustfully at passing journalists.\n\nI became a steady patron of two bars. Portaletas, on Puerto Street, became my homesick caf\u00E9, because the food included marinated cod topped with diced sweet peppers, marinated salmon with diced raw onion, and salmon in a cream cheese\u2013like spread, all on toasted slices of baguette. I might as well have been eating at Barney Greengrass, on New York's Upper West Side. Even more to my liking was Tpetxa, on Pescaderia Street. The establishment should not be confused with a less appealing bar called Tximista, which is a half-block away and like Tpetxa has its name on a Coca-Cola sign hanging over the front door. The Coca- Cola Company has cornered the overhead-sign market in Spain.\n\nDrinks at Tpetxa came in oversize plastic party glasses, perhaps to ensure minimum breakage whenever the men in the black berets start singing and their fervor for greater autonomy is aroused. Ask for wine and you get about an inch poured into your wide-bottomed glass at a cost of less than a dollar. Choices include red, white, ros\u00E9 or Txakoli, a flavorless, excessively sharp local product poured with great ceremony\u2014think Tom Cruise in Cocktail.\n\nHere I ate txangurro a la donostiarra, which is the meat and roe from the omnipresent spider crab cooked in butter with a few mild spices and spread on bread; it reminded me of the excessively rich seafood spread my mother put out at bridge parties. I particularly liked the pinchos, which are tapas on toothpicks. My favorites included the unusually tender octopus and the marinated bonito tuna that had much in common with Chicken of the Sea (packed in oil, not water). My favorite hot pincho\u2014I'm assuming a brochette belongs in the pincho family\u2014came with pork, green pepper, onion and bacon, familiar skewered fare. The grilled chorizo sausages were irresistible, in part because they came on fresh bread regardless of the hour, right up to closing time.\n\nTapas are almost always eaten standing up. The customer grabs a small napkin, takes whatever he wants, eats it quickly, tosses the napkin and starts again. By the end of an evening, the floor of a tapas bar resembles Broadway after a ticker-tape parade. I was initially astonished by the astuteness of the bartenders, who seemed able to keep track of infinite customers helping themselves to a profusion of food, and then I realized tapas are consumed on the honor system. Each person keeps his own tally and pays up when he departs. I guess it takes a New Yorker to be flabbergasted by a system that holds human nature in such high esteem.\n\n\n\nAn American chef I know worked as an apprentice at Mart\u00EDn Berasategui, named for the chef-owner and located in a town a few miles outside San Sebasti\u00E1n. She advised me to eat there because the food was wonderful and because the chef had forty or more apprentices and students working in his kitchen, all of them unpaid. \"Go see what food can be like in a restaurant with no labor costs,\" she said. Berasategui, I suspect, intends to become the Paul Bocuse of Spain. He has seven restaurants, including the flagship establishment in Lasarte where I went for lunch on a glorious afternoon. The dining room is among the most formal in San Sebasti\u00E1n, and I was happy to see a table on the patio set for a party of one.\n\nI settled into a wicker chair with a peach-color cushion and checked out the sights: a pure-white cat in search of scraps, a table filled with American women futilely trying to coerce a smile out of their waitress, a nice little hillside planted with flowers and an attractive valley off to the side festooned with a few artfully arranged cows (as well as two less fascinating suburban homes). I ordered the tasting menu, as I did at Arzak, but before starting I noticed an \u00E0 la carte item of grand reserve Iberian ham.\n\nIberian ham, named for both the Iberian Peninsula and for the predecessors of the Basques, is one of the great cured meats of Europe. I'd had no luck getting a taste, even though great haunches hang from the ceilings of most tapas bars. When I'd ordered the mixto jam\u00F3n at Portaletas, I ended up with hot ham and melted cheese on a roll. The Iberian ham at Mart\u00EDn Berasategui was sweeter and softer than most cured hams, perhaps because of an unusually long period of aging. It had the mellowness of aged beef, the kind in which fat and meat become almost indistinguishable.\n\nAfter the ham, the amuse-gueule portion of my meal began. I gulped a few marble-size leek-and-potato puffs, liking them but thinking the potato was excessively pureed. Little did I know that these puffs were a harbinger of a maleficent mashed-potato problem that would haunt me throughout my stay in San Sebasti\u00E1n.\n\nThe second amuse-gueule, a spoonful of celery sorbet, was a triumph. I dislike celery, a harsh, fibrous vegetable utilized exclusively for medicinal purposes in ancient days, proof indeed that the bloodletters and butchers of yore weren't entirely misguided. The sorbet here was infused with a sweet, fresh celery essence hitherto unknown to me. Almost as lofty was a tiny cup of cream-of-cauliflower soup, absolutely devoid of this skull-shaped vegetable's basic funkiness. Next came an anchovy on toast. I pushed it aside, as any right-thinking diner would do. These smelly little excuses for seafood are omnipresent in the cuisine of northern Spain, and I am proud to say I overcame my instinct to flee any restaurant placing one before me.\n\nI'd read reports, not all of them favorable, of Berasategui's mille-feuille of foie gras, smoked eel, spring onion and apple. It sounded fine, but I'm always tempted to excuse outrageousness in the pursuit of sumptuousness. Generous portions of smoked fish, goose liver and puff pastry are not easily counterbalanced by a few slivers of apple and onion, but perhaps that was not the chef's intention and he merely wished to see his customers swoon. And so I did.\n\nHaving concluded the hors d'oeuvres, I was now ready to proceed with lunch. A cream soup, almost imperceptibly scented with almonds, contained a brace of the startlingly orange local egg yolks plus a sweet grilled scallop topped with chopped black truffles. Miniature croutons made of potato flour floated about. My brain raced to catalog the combinations, but my palate objected not at all.\n\nThe next soup was even better. A tray arrived at the table, and upon it was a spoonful of fennel sorbet, a bowl with a slice of seafood aspic at the bottom and a tiny pitcher of frothy anisette cream. The warm cream, poured into the bowl, melted the aspic and released bits of sea exotica, creating an extra-rich fish soup. The fennel sorbet provided a needed cooling touch, for my taste buds were feverish by now.\n\nA traditional presentation of monkfish in clam sauce followed, although I noted two kinds of clams, the sweet, tender ones I know only by their Italian name of vongole and some chewier ones sliced thin, like conch. With it was a flaccid puree of potato, a grievous example of how local chefs have turned this splendidly stolid foodstuff into mush. The fourth course was pigeon, the breast served rare, as is typical of the region, and a leg well-done. With it was a chestnut cream similar in texture to the aforementioned potatoes, but a cream is justified in assuming an inert shape on a plate, whereas a potato is not. A bit of pigeon p\u00E2t\u00E9 on toast and more foie gras, probably duck, added considerable opulence.\n\nThe more interesting of my two desserts was a \"chocolate surprise\" accompanied by cinnamon ice cream. Much like the sorbets, the ice cream was inspired; I believe the ambitious Berasategui has missed a trick by not franchising ice cream parlors. The chocolate surprise was a hollow cylinder containing a fig compote in a milk liquor, delicious but slightly underwhelming, considering the billing. The petits fours consisted of three tiny nibbles: a bit of chocolate truffle on a spoon, a cup of vanilla ice cream with berry coulis, and a room-temperature beverage that hovered between cocoa and chocolate sauce.\n\nThe cost of this meal was typical of what I paid at all four restaurants, about $100. In addition to the tasting menu and the Iberian ham, I had also ordered a glass of white wine and a half bottle of 1994 La Rioja Alta Vina Ardanza, a red wine of medium body with a wonderfully ripe Rioja nose. (The bill here and throughout San Sebasti\u00E1n included a service charge, but at least 10 percent extra should be left in restaurants of this distinction.)\n\nAfterward I asked to meet the chef, in part because I wished to see the extraordinary kitchen where infinite apprentices turn out innumerable courses. I was not disappointed by its grandeur. Should the Basque separatists ever march on San Sebasti\u00E1n, the leaders would be well-advised to capture this enormous cookhouse and use it to feed their troops.\n\nBerasategui admitted to me that he indeed had a number of apprentices, but he insisted that all food consumed by patrons of his restaurant was prepared by an experienced core staff of ten. He said he gave credit to his mother, not to his students, for his success as a cook. I congratulated him on offering the most elaborate meal I've even eaten for such a modest price, and he said, \"It is why I am not rich.\"\n\n\n\nAkela're, high on a hill, offers a sweeping view similar to what a sailor in a crow's nest must experience far out at sea: Practically nothing. While I was having lunch, the water was calm, the vista flat, the excitement minimal.\n\nAkela're looked somewhat Danish modern to me, although the small, sleek, all-metal rest rooms seemed more suited to an ocean liner. The chef is Pedro Subijana, every bit the equal of any chef in San Sebasti\u00E0n but a man possessing a vision of gastronomic pleasure not quite in keeping with my own. His food reminded me of what Boy Scouts are forced to subsist on when they camp in the woods. Here, too, was sorbet, but while Mart\u00EDn Berasategui extracted delightfully restrained sensations from his fennel or celery, Subijana held nothing back. His black-olive sorbet was an overwhelming icy olive concentrate I might have enjoyed more had he added gin and labeled it a martini slush. Yet he occasionally produced food perfectly to my liking. Such was the amuse-gueule in the style of a pincho\u2014a tiny skewer with bits of lamb kidney, lamb sweetbread, caramelized onion and crisp bacon inserted into a tiny glass filled to the brim with a sweet onion soup. The idea was to first eat the tiny brochette, then drink the luscious soup, both of which I did with pleasure.\n\nThe first course of the tasting menu was fava beans and peas under a topping of \"mint snow.\" To me, it was too much like eating veggies while sucking on an Italian water ice. Then came a series of courses based on prized local pickings, including an uninspired lentil broth saved by a savory mushroom foam, unflavorful mystery greens with the mouth feel of caterpillars and little forest mushrooms that had no purpose other than looking cute. Somewhat more interesting but essentially incoherent was sticky rice laced with bits of ham and wrapped in a chewy film made of dried fruit.\n\nMy mood improved with the sole, which arrived on a bed of shredded white asparagus. It was topped with bits of dried fruit and hot peppers, a fascinating combination that worked out just fine. With it came a little pot of a lovely stewed vegetable that I assumed was asparagus, inasmuch as a stalk of asparagus stuck out of it. I was later to find out I'd consumed stewed nettles, merit-badge cuisine. Finally, duck appeared. It was wonderful duck, transcendent duck, but it may be that my admiration for this glazed mallard was heightened by my intense desire for something possessing the properties of meat. With it came a puree of a vegetable I'm convinced had never previously been consumed by a member of the human race. To further complicate the mystery of its identity, this arcane plant life was scented with vanilla.\n\nThis was my third meal in San Sebasti\u00E1n. While I was eating the duck, I realized that with few exceptions, almost every dish I'd tried worked best with a crisp, flavorful white wine. Unfortunately, Spain makes few of these. The Basque Country is adjacent to La Rioja, home of complex, delicious, aromatic, wood-aged red wines, but Riojas do not match up well with the sweet, complex flavors of nueva cocina vasca.\n\n\n\nThe last of the four restaurants on my itinerary, Zuberoa, is located a few miles outside San Sebasti\u00E1n in the tiny town of Oiartzun. By the time I set out for dinner, I believed I had become an authority not just on the local food but also on the surrounding countryside. After all, I had found my way to the hilltop aerie of Akela're and to the nearly unmarked Mart\u00EDn Berasategui. I drove off with confidence.\n\nNearly an hour later, desperate, I pulled off the road, accosted an elderly couple outside their home and implored them for help. The lady got into her Citro\u00EBn, signaled me to follow and took off on a wild ride past three subdivisions, two traffic circles and one construction site, finally screeching to a halt in front of a tiny mecca of bird-chirping, small-town serenity. I invited her to have dinner with me, but she declined, obviously and understandably preferring her husband to an addled American.\n\nZuberoa reminded me of an ancient Basque farmhouse, which it might well have been. The ceilings were beamed and the floor was polished stone, although dark blue walls, blue draperies and track lighting diminished the agrarian effect. A corps of waitresses stood at near attention throughout dinner, poised to swoop with Air Rescue efficiency whenever a customer seemed in need. Ten seconds after my napkin slipped from my knee, a waitress was there with a fresh one held between two silver spoons.\n\nMy tasting menu started off with a pancake of pillowy softness stuffed with smoked-salmon mousse and (according to the menu) \"aromatised\" with anchovy essence, a kind of eau de fish. Fortunately, the odor was too faint to detect. My second course seemed wonderfully French, a cup containing a thin layer of foie gras cream topped with a layer of truffled jelly topped with a pea-flavored mousse containing shavings of ham cracklings. Next came a perfect scallop covered with chopped black truffles (duplicating the presentation at Mart\u00EDn Berasategui) and paired with vanilla-scented ravioli. I don't mean to pick on chef-owner Hilario Arbelaitz, for he is no guiltier than a multitude of other San Sebasti\u00E1n chefs in overestimating the versatility of vanilla; the mismatching of vanilla with earthy ingredients brought back unhappy memories of the excesses of French nouvelle cuisine. The fourth course was a soup consisting of two oysters in a light fennel-cream broth garnished with bits of chive and beet as well as a few salmon eggs. With it came another peculiar sweet, dried fruit wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Dried, salted cod, one of the culinary backbones of the region since the days when Basque fishing fleets sailed to the North Atlantic, was the fifth course, but I found the reconstituted fish too translucent and too salty. The chefs in San Sebasti\u00E1n doggedly insist on using their famous bacalao in many dishes in which fresh cod would be clearly superior. I had spotted an interesting red wine on Zuberoa's list, a 1968 Bodegas Riojanas Vi\u00F1a Albina Reserve for about $30, so I asked if I could have meat instead of the red mullet on the tasting menu. By now I was so accustomed to the amenability of the restaurants, I knew I wouldn't be refused. I asked for Zuberoa's famous calf's snout but was presented with a calf's jaw instead. I'm certain it was an honest mistake, the sort of accident that can happen whenever a cook is rummaging around in the meat locker searching for obscure body parts.\n\nThe jaw, which came in a sweet, pale sauce, had the sort of gelatinous chewiness I associate with calf's foot. (Memo to Centers for Disease Control: Note brilliant insight leading to certain breakthrough in hoof-and- mouth-disease research.) My waitress, noticing my unhappiness, rushed off to get the snout, which was more in the familiar braised-beef category. (Memo to celebrity chefs: Note possibility of replacing pricey short ribs with economical facial cuts.) The snout was lean, soft and savory and came with more of those silly mashed potatoes reduced to near liquid form. I decided that the wine\u2014fragile, pale, with the scent of crumbled bricks and the body of a dying old Burgundy\u2014was more a jaw wine than a snout wine.\n\nThe last of the main courses was saddle of rabbit, which I'd never encountered before; it consisted of a long, unattractive bone with a nugget of meat at one end. The standard two-dessert package followed. The first was based on another Basque classic, curdled ewe's milk, but here it had been smoked. I recommend it to people who like barbecue for dessert. The second tasted like a Spanish version of Key lime pie and was a major improvement over most of the ones I've eaten in Florida.\n\nAfterward, in excellent English, my heretofore mute waitress offered me a complimentary glass of the local digestif. I was unmoved by the apple brandy but astounded by her suppressed language skills. \"Two years in England,\" she said. I wonder if the chefs of San Sebasti\u00E1n realize that standards can be maintained even if women are permitted to speak.\n\n\n\nWhat I realized after eating at the four signature restaurants of San Sebasti\u00E1n was how comfortably I had settled into every one. Despite my aversion to the omnipresent anchovy, which tastes like something a shark would spit out, and my sadness at the mistreatment of the noble tuber, I felt perfectly at home everywhere I ate. In part, I credit the cordiality and generosity of these four restaurants, but mostly it was their familiar sensibilities.\n\nArzak could slip easily into New York City. Like the most celebrated restaurants of Manhattan, Gramercy Tavern in particular, it combines simplicity and refinement. To the Basques, the cuisine of Arzak might be an expression of nueva cocina vasca, but to me it tasted like food I could eat every day.\n\nMart\u00EDn Berasategui, with its ambition and generosity, brought back memories of the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. If Mart\u00EDn Berasategui had a flaw, it was excessiveness, which I easily forgive.\n\nAkela're, although technically excellent, was all wrong for me. It should appeal to people with palates unlike mine, those who admire the rusticity of peas, beans, olives and anchovies. Akela're feels emotionally linked to the land and the sea, which I am not. Its food reminded me of spa cuisine.\n\nZuberoa called to mind one of my favorite Paris restaurants, Guy Savoy. Parisian chefs love extremes, an elaborate foie gras cream at one course followed by an unlikely cut of beef at another, flip-flopping from the art house to the farmhouse.\n\nI have never believed there are places where all the food is good, any more than I believe there are places where all the women are beautiful, all the days are sunny, all the beaches are clean or all the winds blow true. Having been to San Sebasti\u00E1n, perhaps I should reconsider these disheartening convictions. Finding the right dining spot can do wonders for a man's outlook on life."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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