Mugaritz — Restaurant in Errenteria

Huge disappointment

Weeks of excitement about a new culinary journey at Mugaritz turned into deflation and disappointment. What I had hoped would be the best culinary experience of my life was an unhappy one.

I've been to a handful of high end and Michelin star restaurants with similar reputations, I've come away from each of those mesmerised and inspired as you should. After Mugaritz my overwhelming emotion was dissatisfaction.

Mugaritz, located in the hills of San Sebastian unquestionably challenges perception of food and delivers beautiful looking dishes. For me personally, this isn't enough. I like to be challenged and taken on a journey with food, but at the same time, it must be something that tastes amazing to create that positive experience.

Mugaritz perhaps doesn't see itself as a restaurant at all and instead an experience. I think this is something any potential diner should be comfortable with before going. Mugaritz has dived so deeply into this approach that the taste of the dishes aren't at the forefront of the chef's thinking when creating them. For Mugaritz, it's all about the journey and the experience. I've heard the owner talk about taking customers to a different world. The reason this review lands so harshly is firstly the underwhelming flavour of the food, but secondly, we were in no way taken on that journey to a new world. Dishes weren't given enough explanation and there was also little care given to whether we had understood what we were eating. The food was unquestionably new, challenging, and different... is that enough? New, challenging and different doesn't necessarily mean good. Perhaps our tasting menu fell particularly short of this, but it appears others experience similar.

We had in the region of 18 tasting dishes. All tiny, all photo worthy, all unusual, some genuinely lacking in flavour or unpleasant to eat. There were dishes neither myself nor my partner finished out of choice, not because it wasn't to our taste, because it was unpleasant (coming from someone who literally loves everything food related!). To put the size of the courses into perspective, we both left wanting to eat more food because we hadn't eaten enough. There was nothing substantial throughout the menu, including a meat dish that was a wafer thin crisp.

The staff were friendly, but the service was so far short of the level that Mugartiz is touted to be. I've experience exceptional service at other restaurants and this didn't compare. There was nothing exciting about it, nothing different, nothing to bring any dish to life. When we arrived we were left in a holding room that had no interaction or anything that added to the experience. In other Michelin star restaurants, this has been the start of the experience whether it's being served a drink, small bite or having someone explain the history of the restaurant. We were just left with the other guests in a lowly lit room, waiting to be called through to the main restaurant.

We were at Mugaritz for a landmark birthday, this was discussed prior with the restaurant. Nothing was done nor acknowledged in any way. We made our feelings known to the restaurant about our disappoint at the food and overall experience. There was little acknowledgement, no sorry and no empathy.

Communications continued with Mugaritz for weeks after the meal. Initial shock of such an underwhelming experience turned to a realisation that it simply wasn't right. In proceeding communications we stated our huge disappointment and their lack of acknowledgement of this. The way Mugaritz dealt with the situation was "If we wanted to just make our food about taste we would just serve lobster." "Your opinion is wrong, we are Mugaritz". I get it, they want to be divisive but this was the most expensive tasting menu I've experienced and the most unsatisfying.

My one piece of advice... If you are motivated by having a great tasting meal, avoid Mugaritz, there are other great Michelin star restaurants in San Sebastian and delightful food in the bustling restaurants in the town - any...

I had such high expectations for Mugaritz. I was in San Sebastian 5 years ago, and wasn't able to get a reservation here. So, it's always been on my bucket list to come back, and try out the restaurant. Well, I kind of wish I hadn't.

Nearly all the dishes ranged from disappointing to outright terrible. Our final dessert course was literally a single drop of bitter chicken stock on a giant white platter. Not only was the taste acrid and not dessert-like at all, they also gave zero utensils. You had to eat the goop with your fingers, or by licking the plate. Now don't get me wrong, normally, I'd have a lot of fun with that. But not when you're paying hundreds of dollars for inedible food.

They don't necessarily aim to make all dishes delicious. Instead, they're using their customers as guinea pigs for their creative genius.

No two tables get the same menu. On any given night, they prepare 70 different dishes. The staff then figure out how to combine these different dishes for each table in unique ways. I guess we may have just gotten really, really unlucky?

There seemed to be a consistent theme of repeated ingredients and techniques throughout many of our dishes:

1. Fat emulsion
2. Sherry
3. Fermentation
4. Meat sauce
5. Red peppers

My recommendation: save your money, and go spend it elsewhere at any other restaurant in San Sebastian.

Here was our menu:

1. Chickory leaves in hummus spread
2. Beef tendon with shisha mushroom, draped in a thin veil of bacon
3. Baby carrots in Danish yogurt
4. Bonbon of fresh herbs and flower petals (marigold, dahlia, agastache, mexican aster, nasturtium) in a tart cream, cooked tableside in liquid nitrogen. Really interesting result. Cold and crunchy on the outside, and soft and creamy in the inside
5. Frozen Kiss of the Oyster. Oyster tartare perched on top of a spherical ice ball. You're supposed to pick up the ice ball, kiss it, and then eat the oyster. Fun, but the theatrics of the ice ball didn't really do it for me
6. Vermouth gelee in a kamquat
7. Fermented Mexican mole, dried and pressed with chilies, chocolate powder and bone marrow butter. This was the first dish I really enjoyed. It was creative, flavorful, and fun
8. Minestrone soup filtered 3 times, and served with the seeds of the vegetables in the minestrone soup. The first dish that came with a utensil
9. Hake with unfiltered Japanese sake. Individually, the ingredients were delicious. The combination didn't work for me though. The sake was way too strong for the dish and overpowered the fish
10. Roux of octopus served with red pepper sauce. Too bitter
11. Baby shrimp from southern Spain deep fried in powdered lemon and pepper
12. Mugaritz Creme Brulee. Crust on top with two types of cream: sweet corn and a red cream made from the head of a large prawn
13. Sliced potato kombucha with baked parmesan cheese, served with green tea kombucha
14. Red mullet tartare served with a red mullet reduced sherry. This dish was pretty bad. The tartare was nothing special, and the sherry overpowered the fish
15. Flaky bread with garlic and powdered potato topped with blue fish roe
16. Tempura mushroom marinated in sherry and covered in meat sauce
17. Bone marrow with lamb broth and raspberries
18. Smoked lobster with beef sauce and vanilla
19. Emulsion of beef tendon and beef fat, served on a beef bone. To eat, you lick the emulsion off the bone. Fun concept, but the taste was pretty terrible. You're literally just licking thick fat off a bone.
20. Grilled grouper with local red pepper with emulsion of cow fat. The fat was just unnecessary. Unfortunate, because the fish was quite good
21. Lettuce heart with chorizo sauce and powdered red pepper. Salty and not great
22. Squid with Iberican pork sauce
23. Ice cream with toasted rice
24. Beef marshmallow with toffee sauce
25. Bread and smoked cheese
26. A single dollop of chicken broth reduction. I thought this was a joke when it arrived on the table, but nope, this was really the last course....

We were two people who had lunch at Mugaritz in mid May and we had been looking forward to it since we booked it a few months previously. We were served 23 different things over two and a half hours and we were disappointed with our experience.

Two things I discovered subsequently were as follows: The menu is changed completely every year and begins afresh in March, so we had the 2023 menu. If you look at the reviews for the restaurant it is most helpful to order by most recent because the older ones are not commenting on the food that you will be served. When you isolate the 2023 reviews, it is instructive and I felt instantly less lonely in my assessment and describe the reviewers as “polarised”. The chef was awarded the San Pellegrino lifetime icon award in 2023 for culinary evolution and innovation. On their site they described him as “even questioning whether dishes need to be delicious at all to be valuable”. If this is an accurate quotation then we have a difference of opinion. I think dishes need to be delicious to be valuable, I think they are helped if they look gorgeous and their good looks plus textures, flavours and temperatures guide my judgement of the food on the plate.

I have tried to be analytical about what I thought of the 23 things put in front of me that day and I have stepped through my photos to assign dishes to categories and tried to be binary.

Appearance: Lots of the dishes look good, some are very beautiful and I think that is important. 13 I thought looked great. 10 I thought didn’t look great, of which 2 I thought were really ugly and those 2 were the ones that were moulded to represent body parts.

Taste: Many of the dishes tasted very good. I thought 10 tasted very good. I thought 13 did not taste very good. 13 is a very high number to characterise as not tasting very good. Why didn’t I like the taste of 13 of the dishes? By volume the reasons were: a) 3 were glutinous or greasy or slimy which may be synonyms for each other; b) 3 were thick and cloying; c) 3 had little taste and gelatine seemed to figure more frequently than I thought necessary; d) 2 were gritty; e) 1 was a dry dense piece of tasteless fish that was quite awful; f) Offal can be reimagined and rediscovered, but it if has a particularly difficult texture it is probably best minced and given to the cat.

The location was fabulous and the room a great space. The staff were lovely people and I empathised with them.

On a tangent, the toilet paper was fun. It was the toilet paper being fun that made me realise that fun had absented itself from lunch and something overly zealous had sat in its chair. At times I wondered if we were unwitting players in an elaborate practical joke.

I think the above are the reasons my wife and I enjoyed the food less than we had hoped and expected. There is one more reason. My wife and I both felt that our stomachs were “queasy” after this lunch.

In my opinion my experience was poor value for money. I hope that others appreciate it...