Gastronomer: A Spanish restaurant where technology serves up deliciousness

SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain — The waiter places a plate of clear, viscous liquid before me. From a small mug, he pours a red liquid into the clear one. I expect the mixture to turn pink; instead, the cardinal-colored liquid spreads, forming seemingly irregular shapes. It branches again and again, until a pattern emerges. In every new branch there is a copy of the larger form, as in a snow crystal or a coral; it is a miniature image of eternity.

In just a few seconds, a perfect geometric form has emerged — a fractal — with thousands of small details, more exacting than a human hand could draw. It is possibly the most beautiful dish I have ever seen, and it leaves me stunned and speechless, afraid to touch it. Then the waiter tucks a spoon into the liquid, fills the spoon and pours the liquid over a lemon tart, breaking the form. As I eat, I keep wondering what happened, amazed that something so beautiful can appear and disappear so fast. Then the meal at Restaurante Arzak continues.

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In 1989, Arzak became the first place in Spain to achieve three Michelin stars. It was a turning point, heralding the start of the new Spanish gastronomy and the beginning of the end of French hegemony.

Chef Juan Mari Arzak challenged the French supremacy by using Spanish and Basque ingredients and new methods. By inventing new classics and reinterpreting old ones, he has playfully and quietly moved the boundaries of gastronomy. He didn’t get to the top by adhering to tradition — or even rebelling against it — but by being himself: proudly Basque, and more emotional than technical.

Unlike at Arzak, the aim of El Bulli, Ferran Adria’s celebrated avant-garde restaurant outside Barcelona, has been not so much to please as to innovate. And when Adria closes his restaurant this year after more than a decade, it might be interpreted as a sign that his kind of cuisine has come to the end of the line. After spherification, foams, garlic-and-almond sorbet and “Kellogg’s Paella,” what would come next? What could come? Flying saucers? Is this the end of the new Spanish cuisine or, indeed, of modern cuisine, as its detractors claim? Did the revolution eat itself?

Meanwhile, Juan Mari Arzak and his daughter, Elena, have managed to keep their three stars, and the food is still playful and surprising. With the closing of El Bulli and the death in February of Adria’s fierce anti-modernist arch-rival, Santi Santamaria, Arzak will be considered arguably Spain’s finest restaurant, once again in the spotlight.

This restaurant, not married to the ideology of modernism, might nonetheless show what the future holds for modern cuisine.

When we look back on the Adria-dominated decade of modernist cooking, I am sure it will be seen as transformative, even revolutionary. I also think it will be seen as an anomaly, with its focus on technology over taste, method over result. You didn’t have to like the food as long as you knew that it was something the world had never seen before. (Although I enjoyed them tremendously when I had them at El Bulli, I am pretty sure people will not be eating artificial olives 50 years from now, if they can avoid it.)