A very interesting experience (9/2023), giving Mugaritz 4 stars. A very influential place/chef, it…read morewas a bucket list type place so all of the poor reviews and friends' advice couldn't stop me from seeing it for myself.
Like others have said, they try to give a unique experience, saying they don't follow a traditional fine dining format, but more just serve you textures and temperatures in no particular order - somewhat true, but the meal did still follow (albeit loosely) the standard, with light bites followed by more substantial entree type dishes, and a little sweet to end. There were few courses where utensils were provided, most of the meal was to be experienced with your hands. The menu was definitely an experience, and it's sort of masochistic - they don't want you to like everything, and pushed us to tell them which dishes/courses/flavors/anything we didn't like.
Overall though, the food was mostly good. Nothing with flavor that will blow you away, but the creativity I do greatly appreciate, and I've been to enough of these dinners where something weird and off the beaten path like this is appreciated. There were a couple courses that unfortunately fell flat in terms of flavor, and of course they were the 'weird' courses too - the milk from a fake boob was flavorless and made a mess, the cider "skin" peeled from the face had no flavor and fell apart, making this course basically one where you have to pick up sauce with your hands and eat it.
My main issue with the experience overall was the service. Maybe they were understaffed, but it was just bad. The cups are wooden, so servers can't tell that they're empty unless they're standing over them basically. They wouldn't serve a dish unless they had two people ready to serve them simultaneously, which resulted in multiple times where the food was sitting by our table, with one server awkwardly trying to flag down another so we could be served - one of these took like 3 minutes which was very weird. They made a whole spiel about the wine experience where you choose a painting from a booklet and give them keywords to help them choose a bottle for you, but they took that booklet and never asked us about it again so I guess they didn't wanna do that. The wine list is very short, the sommelier couldn't tell us much about the wines we asked about. Also there was one sommelier for the entire service, and the servers refused to pour wine for us so we would sit empty for long periods of time, and the wine was out of our reach where it would be weird to get up and pour our own. We asked one server multiple times to refill our glasses after an extended period of time, and he reluctantly poured the wine, except he did so into my cup with water in it? Barely an apology, no fresh water cup offered or anything. Just very weird stuff from a 2 michelin star/world's best restaurant, where consistency and attention to detail are typically the standard.
