San Sebastian honors Berasategui's 50 years at the stove
Gastronomika's 28th edition marked fifty years of New Basque Cuisine with a tribute to the chef who turned Lasarte-Oria into a three-star address, plus two further awards.
Martín Berasategui marked 50 years at the stove this month, and Gastronomika used its 28th edition in San Sebastian to say so in public. The congress ran October 5 to 7 at the Kursaal Palace, built its programme around the 50th anniversary of New Basque Cuisine, and gave its grand tribute to the chef whose restaurant in Lasarte-Oria still holds three Michelin stars.
The anniversary reaches back to a 1976 roundtable in Madrid, the meeting Gastronomika now calls "the spark that lit the fire." Four people who were in that room — José Luis López Canís, Pedro Subijana, Rafael Ansón and Imelda Moreno — returned to San Sebastian this October to mark it. What followed reshaped Basque cooking, and with it much of modern Spanish cuisine, moving plates away from heavy, French-trained classicism toward lighter sauces and recognisably local ingredients.
Half a century for Berasategui
Fifty years on, New Basque Cuisine's recipe is still what San Sebastian sells the world.
Berasategui opened his first kitchen as a teenager and built an operation that now carries 12 Michelin stars across his restaurants, three of them held by the flagship in Lasarte-Oria, on the edge of San Sebastian. Gastronomika framed its tribute around that arc: a chef who trained in the generation after the 1976 founders — Juan Mari Arzak, Pedro Subijana, Karlos Arguiñano and others — and carried their project into its second half-century.
Two further awards came with the tribute. The Golden Gueridon went to Luis Gutiérrez, head of The Wine Advocate in Spain, for his reading of Spanish wine since 2013. The Pau Albornà i Torras Award went to American food writer Anya von Bremzen, whose book "The New Spanish Table" has carried Spanish cooking to English-language readers for two decades. A separate segment honoured chef and teacher Luis Irizar as "the Master."
A congress still built on names
Pierre Gagnaire, Michel Troisgros and Gastón Acurio spoke across the three days, keeping Gastronomika's format intact: chefs talking to other chefs rather than trend panels. A cod festival ran alongside the main stage, and grill specialists from Getaria cooked turbot live for the crowd, the kind of produce-first detail locals already know from a weekend spent working out what to eat in San Sebastian.
None of it changes what New Basque Cuisine did in 1976, or why the city still trades on it: three-star kitchens within walking distance of pintxo bars, built on the same Basque produce. The region's weight at the Michelin Guide Spain 2027 gala, due in Huesca this December, will be one more marker of how far that 1976 meeting actually travelled.
