Bourdain Reveals His Ultimate - Last Meal on Earth - Restaurant - Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown.

The Basques were here first. They have been speaking their language in this corner of the Pyrenees since long before the Romans turned up in 65 BC, and nobody can tell you where it came from, because it is the one language in Europe that appears to be related to nothing else at all. The genetic evidence says much the same: the people living here now are the people who were living here twenty-five thousand years ago. Anthony Bourdain starts on the coast over a plate of percebes, barnacles steamed with a little salt, being told that the old houses all face inland because nobody could afford a window onto that wind. Then he goes to San Sebastián, which has more Michelin stars per head than anywhere on earth, and where the ordinary bars are just as good.

He is here mostly for one man. Juan Mari Arzak holds three stars, helped invent modern Basque cooking as part of the group of twelve chefs who set out in 1976 to drag it forward without breaking it, and walking through this city with him, Tony says, is like walking through Chicago with Michael Jordan. They do a pintxo crawl, bar to bar, and stop at Ganbara for seared wild mushrooms with foie gras and a raw egg yolk melting over the top — a dish Tony has decided cannot be improved. Later, at the restaurant Arzak’s family has run since 1897, his daughter Elena sends out course after course and Tony says out loud that he would like to die at this table. Then he says something else. His own father died young. Since he first came here in 2001, this man has looked after him like one, and he wants him to know he is grateful.

There is also the fire. At Elkano in the fishing village of Getaria, they practise what chefs call paleolithic cooking — almost nothing but coals and the best fish anyone can find. Owner Aitor Arregi grills a whole turbot and takes it apart on the plate piece by piece, skin, belly, the sweet scraps off the bone, so that one fish becomes a dozen different things. Tony calls it an anatomy lesson. And an hour inland, in the Atxondo valley, Victor Arguinzoniz cooks everything at Etxebarri over charcoal he burns himself from wood he cuts himself, including, improbably, caviar. Chefs play a game about where they would want their last meal on earth, Tony says. When he says this place, they all change their answers.

Around it there is a whole country. A shipwright in Pasaia is building a sixteenth-century whaling galleon from scratch, because the Basques were the first industrial whalers and, he says, discovered America without telling anybody — fishermen being the opposite of kings, with no interest in announcing where the fish are. There are txokos, the members-only cooking clubs where one man cooks for the table and where, as one member puts it, you might not have money for a new car or new shoes, but you will have money for food. There is pelota, and an anthropologist who wrote her thesis on it and thinks the obsession with the perfect ball and the obsession with the perfect fish are the same obsession. And when Tony finally asks why the ingredients here are so relentlessly good, the answer is a shrug: we wouldn’t have it any other way.

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