More art than eat: Scathing Mugaritz take-down misses the point

When travel influencer Chloe Jade Meltzer’s scathing take-down of Avant Garde restaurant Mugaritz went viral, it may have provided a moment of slight amusement for nine million people, but it also highlighted the gulf in understanding between the gourmet influencer and the genius of a chef like Andoni Luiz Aduriz.

Meltzer described the experience as the “worst meal” of her life, having spent $1000 on the tasting menu. In a three-video series, Meltzer slated the meal at Mugaritz calling it “revolting” and compared one dish to “literally eating lip gloss.”

Do you think chef Aduriz gives a damn about a viral take-down of his beloved Mugaritz? Not one jot. The chef has never been a slave to the dogma delicious. In fact, Mugaritz has always been more art than eat. The restaurant exists to experiment, push boundaries, and explore what is possible through the medium of food as art.

Of all the fine-dining restaurants that hover around the top of world’s best restaurants lists, Mugaritz is an anomaly. It holds two Michelin stars, because the Michelin inspectors simply don’t know how to rate it appropriately… it may as well have four, or none. A restaurant like Mugaritz defies categorization.

The Basque chef traces a line directly back to Ferran Adrià and elBulli, a movement that rewrote the rules of modern gastronomy. If elBulli was an art movement, you could liken it to say they were the Cubists. A dire social media review of a late-era Picasso painting, claiming that the artist ‘can’t draw,’ misses the point. So does this one.

Mugaritz has always been a very European restaurant. That is, not a traditional European restaurant, but one that embraces the European ideals of creativity without boundaries or limits. Throughout the 20th century, Europe and its great capitals were the incubators of art movements that challenged the notions of what art can be, not always without controversy. Pushback is just part of the process and if you’re pleasing everyone, you’re not staying true to your artistic vision.

The work of Aduriz lives outside of our preconceptions of food and fine dining. If a faux-egg dish at the San Sebastián restaurant can inspire MIT to build aeroplanes differently, then that can be a measure of the creative potential of Aduriz’s cuisine.

Unusually for one of the world’s best chefs, delicious has never been a guiding principle to be adhered to at all costs. In fact, the chef willingly embraces disgusting as color in his palette. The chef is often quoted as saying “We believe you don’t have to like something to like it.” So perhaps before forking out $1000 on a meal in a restaurant, you should at least know who the chef is and what their philosophy is.

Admittedly, Meltzer did not intend the review to go viral, and there’s not much she could have done about it. But as our media consumption becomes ever more atomized into 20-second clips of first-person opinion, there is maybe an inkling of what we are missing or going to miss in the future. At a time when the New York Times’ lead restaurant reviewer is hanging up his knife and fork for good, we need writers and knowledgeable critics to step into the void. There is much to discuss about the menu at Mugaritz, it deserves time and research and considered arguments. Then if we have that, we can, of course, have the snarky take-down for dessert too.