In the Basque village of Atxondo, roughly half an hour from Bilbao and less than an hour from San Sebastián, a stone building on the village square houses a restaurant on its first floor. It holds one Michelin star and finished second in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants in both 2024 and 2025.
There is no gas ring or induction hob in the kitchen. Everything served, from the anchovy and prawn to the beef, the chef’s own mozzarella and the milk ice cream that ends the meal, is cooked over burning wood.
The Man and the Method
Bittor Arguinzoniz grew up in the same village, in a house with neither electricity nor gas, watching his mother and grandmother cook over an open hearth. He spent years working in a factory and never trained professionally as a chef. He bought the building with his father and uncle and began, slowly, to make fire do things it had never been asked to do.
Bittor Arguinzoniz / © joselitolab.com
The equipment is his own. Arguinzoniz designs and builds his grills, each fitted with a hand-cranked pulley system that raises and lowers the cooking surface over the embers in fine increments. It gives him a degree of control over heat that a conventional oven cannot offer. Some grills use mesh fine enough to hold caviar. Others are built to handle an entire beef chop.
The fuel is chosen just as carefully. Oak, vine and holm oak are matched to different ingredients according to how their embers behave and the character they impart to the food. Arguinzoniz splits and prepares the wood himself in a shed behind the kitchen.
There are no foams, gels or dehydrations, and little interest in techniques borrowed from the laboratory. The cooking rests instead on two things: exceptional produce and an obsessive understanding of fire.
Why This Is Difficult
The immediate temptation is to call this simple cooking. It is anything but. Most methods of applying heat are designed to be repeatable. An oven set to 180 degrees produces the same conditions on Tuesday as it does on Friday. Fire does not.
Embers change temperature continuously. Wood behaves differently depending on how it was seasoned and even how the air moves through the room that day. Arguinzoniz is not simply following a recipe. He is reading something that never stays quite the same, making adjustments by hand throughout the evening.
That is also why his style has proved so difficult to export. Arguinzoniz has influenced kitchens around the world. His former lieutenant Lennox Hastie carries that influence to Sydney, while restaurants built around live-fire cooking have appeared almost everywhere. Yet very few produce anything comparable, because the technique cannot simply be written down and reproduced. It is the result of thirty years of judgement, accumulated in one man’s hands.
The Ranking Question
Which brings us to November. Maido in Lima was named The World’s Best Restaurant in 2025 and, under the list’s rules, has now entered the Best of the Best, making it ineligible for future rankings. Etxebarri, runner-up for the past two years, arrives at the 2026 ceremony as the restaurant many in the industry expect to hear called.
It would be an unusual coronation. The list has historically favoured conceptual ambition and technical invention, a tradition of New Nordic kitchens built on foraged specificity, or the multi-course architecture of the Spanish avant-garde. Etxebarri’s proposition is the reverse: a self-taught cook in a village of a few hundred people, doing one thing with total conviction.
It would also challenge the idea that the highest level of gastronomy belongs to cities. That debate has been going on for some time. France’s newest three-star is a stone farmhouse in the Savoie vineyards, not a Paris institution — and the guides have been steadily conceding it.
Arguinzoniz himself is famously uninterested in any of this. Intensely private, he largely avoids the industry circuit and attends just one event each year: the 50 Best ceremony. One suspects he goes because his team deserves to be there. Then he goes home to the woodshed.
Read the full Asador Etxebarri profile
Featured photo: © joselitolab.com