SpiceLines

Juan Mari and Elena Arzak in the "flavor bank" of their
110-year-old restaurant in San Sebastian, Spain.
Photo: www.arzak.info

I’m designing the next house in my head. Off the kitchen there will be a spice room. Actually two of them: a big sunny one for reading, writing and dreaming, and a small dark one, with floor to ceiling shelves stacked with spices, rare and common, from around the world.

So my heart beat a little faster this morning when I opened the Dining In section of The New York Times. There, in “Kitchen Chemistry is Chic, but Is It a Woman’s Place?” by Laura Shapiro (February 28, 2007, page D2), was a photograph of Elena Arzak “in the spice room of her family’s restaurant in Spain.” Behind her were dozens of plastic containers, each neatly labeled, in perfectly arranged stacks of four on shelves from floor to ceiling. The geometric rigor of the arrangement was breathtaking. Not one was a millimeter out of place.

Arzak is a 110-year-old former tavern in San Sebastian, Spain which has won international accolades for its inventive approach to local fare. The late R.W. Apple preferred Arzak to the more renowned El Bulli. In the last article he wrote before his death (“The Global Gourmet,” The New York Times Travel Section, October 5, 2006), he lovingly described the food as “modern and entertaining…often witty, never overwrought.” It was a blend, he said, of "an older French-inspired style of innovation…and the new wave of ground-breaking Spanish cooking." The pleasure he took in a flower-like poached egg or a lamb chop “wearing a tissue-like coffee flavored veil” conveys the central idea: simple, fresh ingredients magically transformed by unexpected flavors and textures.

But about that spice room. At Arzak’s website, I discovered a little more. On the “Investigation” page there is a single cryptic line: “This is one of the best kept secrets from Arzak.” The accompanying photograph says it all: A smiling Elena and her father, Juan Mari, are posed in the spice room. Behind them are literally hundreds of those perfectly ordered containers. At waist level, there appears to be a bank of fluorescently lit, probably refrigerated, cases for perishables. And is that a red floor? Can I get one just like it?

Probing a little further, I found that the spice room is actually the restaurant’s “flavor bank”: a repository of 1,000 products and ingredients that feeds the “laboratory” where father and daughter “lead a group of alchemists” in a daily “investigation.” Their goal: “to find a perfect balance between the avant-garde and the roots of tradition.”

The Squid Circle is one of the fascinating, very complicated recipes that give traditional fare the scientific treatment. Among its ingredients are dried orange peel, powdered sarsaparilla, bergamot tea, cocoa powder and Modena vinegar—all, undoubtedly, plucked from the shelves of the flavor bank. For the record, Elena Arzak told The Times that “a chemistry-based cuisine can be as warm and personal as any other. ‘The science just helps me cook,’ she said.”