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Profile | At 3-Michelin-star San Sebastian restaurant Arzak, Elena Arzak’s father reinvented northern Spain’s Basque cuisine. She’s taking it to a new level

  • Elena Arzak worked with Alain Ducasse before taking over from dad Juan Mari at Arzak. She was named 2012’s best female chef by The World’s 50 Best restaurants
  • The fourth-generation chef recalls how her father helped revolutionise Basque cuisine and explains her cooking philosophy at Arzak, in her family for 126 years

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Elena Arzak is the fourth-generation chef of three-Michelin-star, 126-year-old  Basque family restaurant Arzak. She talks about evolving her father’s groundbreaking approach to the Spanish region’s cuisine. Photo: Mikel Alonso

“My father was run by women, he was an only child in a matriarchy,” says Elena Arzak when we meet in the solid red-brick building that has housed her family’s three-Michelin-star restaurant, Arzak, in San Sebastian, in Spain’s Basque Country, since 1897.

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Arzak’s grandmother, who was widowed early, ran the family restaurant, with help from her mother and aunt. Before he revolutionised northern Spain’s Basque cuisine and became one of the world’s most revered chefs, her father, Juan Mari Arzak, 81, was one of the few men who worked there.

“Basque society has a strong matriarchal culture,” says Elena Arzak, 54. “I grew up thinking it was normal to have mainly women in professional kitchens and it was only later I found out that it’s not like that.”

Now that Arzak runs the restaurant, having incrementally taken the reins from her father over the years, the female dominance remains.

Arzak in San Sebastian, Spain, has been in the family since 1897. Photo: Diaporama
Arzak in San Sebastian, Spain, has been in the family since 1897. Photo: Diaporama

On a recent pre-service tour of the kitchens, I meet more women than I have ever seen in a haute cuisine kitchen. Around 70 per cent of leadership posts at Arzak are held by women.

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Has the cuisine become demonstrably more feminine? On the contrary.

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