Why This 60-Year-Old Restaurant in Spain Is Still One of the World’s Great Dining Destinations
Ashes danced in the air around the turbot, which was encased in a grill basket as exoskeleton, and, over glowing coals, the fish’s skin transformed from the pale color of the ocean floor to light golden and blistered. This turbot, harvested the same dark morning, was reason enough to visit Elkano, the Michelin-starred restaurant that sits comfortably at number 16 on the World’s 50 Best list. Chef Aitor Arregui and his team cook and present the flatfish with finesse earned over three generations of restaurant ownership in tiny Getaria, Spain, a medieval fishing village that juts out like an errant appendage into the Bay of Biscay.
But Elkano has achieved something that eludes many of its lofty, award-winning peers: perfection. I don’t say that lightly. Nor can I think of a more enchanting meal. Elkano, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2024, is a balm for the globe-trotting diner, a reset button for our relationship with fine dining.
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Arregui’s motivation in cooking, he told me, “is to continue sharing the maritime territory and the knowledge of sailors from our home with all those who visit us.” His grandfather owned drinks-only Bar Elkano and set up a grill for fishermen to cook their own catch. Arregui’s father, Pedro, converted those patrons and neighbors into direct suppliers when he opened Elkano in 1964. “Some of the people we continue to work with are the sons of those who supplied fish for us, fishing at all times, whatever they could catch,” says Arregui. “Fishing, especially in Getaria, is generational.”
I caught a cab in San Sebastián, that great Basque food city, and rode west for a half hour, hugging the bay for the last five minutes of the metered journey. I don’t know quite what I expected, but Michelin star be damned, Elkano hews toward homey. A doll—perhaps a chef or some maternal figure, I couldn’t tell—stood on a shelf. A portrait of a fisherman in a Basque beret sat over my shoulder. The spoked wheel of a ship adorned a dining room column. If I had been in Florida, I imagine there would have been a taxidermied sailfish on the wall. But not in this town, whose Latin name means “a place where fish is canned” and even the smallest species are prized.
The collective effect signals ease and warmth; it’s a permission structure to get down to the sticky-fingered business of eating seafood. After a glass of Pedro Ximenez-dosed Cava and a few pristine slivers of last-of-the-season tuna, our server brought out a plate of percebes. I order those ugly, precious barnacles any chance I get, and despite practice, when I squeezed their thick sheathes away from the meat, briny juice shot onto my glasses and across the table at my lunch companion. I squealed at the delightful mess.
Next came a brown puddle of soup in an earthenware bowl. Elkano’s fish soup, a 1964 original from Arregui’s grandmother Joxepa, reads like a Basque cousin to French onion—hold the cheese and add fish stock. In addition to a mass of poached onions, the kitchen includes pan de sopako, or soup bread, made in a bakery in Getaria for the exclusive purpose of thickening soups. Our server brought out a show-and-tell loaf, nearly burnt and sturdy enough to use as a weapon. This elemental bowl of soup did not demand a coordinated tableside pour or a garnish of any sort, just my full concentration on complexity built from the humblest of ingredients.
Oh, and the turbot. The fish arrived on a minimalist platter with a lip designed for finishing Basque pil-pil sauce. The trinity of olive oil, vinegar, and collagen collected at the base of the service piece, and our server emulsified it with a spoon. For our first wave of fish, he presented filets from the softer side of the fish that touches the sand, the flesh that faces the sun, and the fin from which we nibbled meat from the bones. The protein structure of the different parts varies, he explained, as does the texture and flavor. Sit, savor, reflect. That time of year, too, turbot in the Bay of Biscay were feasting on blue fish, which plumped up the bottom dwellers with a fresh supply of fat.
Next came the collar, which we ate like ribs with collagen-smeared hands. The server then delivered a piece of the turbot’s neck directly onto my fork followed by a cheek and eyeball into individual soup spoons. I gasped at the drama and fleshy pleasure of it all. My lunch companion generously ceded the turbot’s brain, which I sucked from its skull with a noisy technique usually reserved for crawfish and carabineros.
At last, only fin-y debris and skin remained. Our server encouraged us to take out time, get at all the morsels left clinging. I had never been so intimate with a fish.
No, I could not come down from that turbot moment with dessert, nor could I leave Elkano without eating kokotxas. Long before fish collars and offal and off-cuts became buzzy, Arregui the senior decided that rich and jiggly cod and hake throats deserved a higher calling than the Basque soup pot. At Elkano, he started serving them three ways: grilled, fried, and pil-pil, presented simply, sashimi-like on a plate as if their transcendency was obvious. It is.
The Arregui family motto is “buy it well and try not to spoil it.” But that’s a gross oversimplification of 60 years’ worth of study on craft, terroir, and anatomy. Arregui is now working with fish offal to see how he can transform it and connect diners with a true whole fish. As our server carved the turbot with a fork and spoon, he told us: “When you do the same thing every day, you think, how far can we push it.”
Rather than how far, how deep might be closer to the truth. What other starred, high-ranking, fine-dining restaurants are chasing, Elkano has built into its character: history, sustainability, microseasonality, invention, passion, community, meaning. My God it’s good. Nearly a year has passed since my visit, and still I’m left clinging to those final bites and the sense of wonder that welled up at a white-clothed table in Getaria.
Click here for more photos of Elkano.
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