I’m driving over hills colored, like an artichoke, in varying shades of green. The windows of my rental car are open to the afternoon breeze, and from the radio an announcer speaks in staccato bursts that crackle like machine-gun fire. This is Euskera, the mother tongue of the Basques: laden with x’s and k’s and unrelated to any other language in the world. It’s said to be almost unlearnable for adults, but to my ear that announcer must be calling a match of pelota, the Basque national game, which is a cross between tennis and handball. I can’t understand a word, but just listening to it makes me giddy; I know I’m heading in the right direction.
The Basques, after all, are one of the few ethnic groups to have retained a strong regional identity in an increasingly homogenized Western world. And though the Basque region encompasses areas of France and Spain where Iberia joins the bulk of the European continent, many Basques identify themselves only as Basques, the lone European ethnic group to have resisted migratory urges and stayed put.
I’ve spent plenty of time in Spain’s Basque region, which includes the stunning seaside city of San Sebastián, part of the Rioja wine appellation, and Bilbao, home to the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Museum. There I’ve found that the unfortunate image of bomb-toting terrorists has little to do with the food-obsessed bankers and businessmen you are likely to encounter in the region.
I’ve also passed through the Pays Basque of southwestern France, but only along the coast, usually stopping at Biarritz for a meal and a stroll along the beach on my way to Spain. Biarritz is a splendid old-world resort town, but with its wrought-iron railings, its American surfing schools, and its ascot-wearing men walking poodles, it is the international façade the Pays Basque shows to the world. The dinner menu at the restaurant inside the imposing Hôtel du Palais, which was built at the behest of the decidedly un-Basque Napoleon III, features veal scaloppine with spaghetti, Caesar salad, smoked salmon with sour cream and blini, steak tartare. I remember that food from Walt Disney World.
You have to travel over those verdant hills to find the real thing. The Basques have their own architecture; sports like pelota, goat races, and the flinging of heavy iron bars; even their own typography: the rounded letters, small i’s, and capital A’s that constitute a sort of national font. And they have their own food, from exquisite dishes at Michelin-starred restaurants to village specialties.
One of those specialties is cider, and I’m on my way to the town of Sare to meet an apple grower named Xavier Laussucq, who has promised to teach me about it. As I pull into the town square and park beside a tent with a striped awning, I see a woman there selling gâteaux basques, pastries filled either with cream or with a type of cherry grown only in the nearby town of Itxassou. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, so I buy a slice of the cherry. When the woman hands it to me, I nearly drop it because of its surprising heft. The Basques are not a subtle people. Yet the crust is somehow flaky to the point of translucence, and the center filled with the richest, darkest, most intensely flavored cherries I’ve tasted. If the packaged fruit pies of my youth were the gustatory equivalent of tinny AM radio, this is a fruit pie in glorious Dolby stereo.
Next, I head over to the Herriko Etxejo Edantegia, which for all its alarming consonants is nothing more than the bar next door. I’ve just been served a bottle of cider when Xavier Laussucq walks in. Taking one sip of my cider—a tart, rustic brew that tastes as if it has run head-on into grappa—he immediately invites me to his house for a bottle of his. “Mine is less green,” he says. “More smooth.”
Soon I’m standing in his driveway of mismatched stones, gazing at a typically ageless and immaculately kept Basque house, with whitewashed walls bisected by the timber beams that are always painted either green or red, the colors of Basque nationalism. “Built by a pirate,” his wife volunteers.
Laussucq’s cider seems no smoother than the bottle I had at the bar, but I’m distracted from all thoughts of apples by something dangling from the frame of the garage—strings of drying peppers, the renowned piments d’Espelette. The peppers of Espelette are a Basque phenomenon, like the cherries of Itxassou, the jambon de Bayonne, and the apples of Sare: They help define this singular nation-state without a nation.
I suddenly want to taste those peppers, to learn Euskera against all odds, to wear a red beret as the Basques do. I’ve been on the ground two hours.
The peppers of Espelette came from the Americas, carried back by explorers in the 15th century. The Basques didn’t have the money to actually buy the spices, which in some cases were worth their weight in gold, so they planted the peppers instead. They grow unusually well in Espelette—a town of maroon-colored shutters with maroon-colored peppers dangling from the window frames—because it is hot and humid in the summer. “The mountains stop the clouds, so it rains quite a lot here,” pepper grower Maritxu Garacotche tells me. In August, he adds, the fields turn bright red, “the color of a matador’s cape.”
“Most hot peppers are nothing but fire,” Garacotche says. But the Espelette peppers are not hot, not compared with the peppers of Mexico or Asia. Instead, they have an undercurrent of sweetness, a point of pride in this town. “This pepper has its own special flavor,” he says. “We use it with meat and with fish, in traditional dishes like axoa[a stew of minced veal], and in our blood sausage. We use it in charcuterie, and we use it with eggs.”
Sheep farmers, the Garacotches harvest peppers both as a hobby and as a sideline. They pick them in August and dry them for a month by putting 40 to 50 on a strand and hanging them everywhere.
Over the course of my stay, I will eat those peppers in almost every form imaginable. That night, in the dining room of the charming Hôtel Euzkadi, I have them roasted with sweet Spanish peppers in one course, ground into axoa for another, and in a sauce with a bit of tomato accompanying a boudin noir as a third. For each dish, they provide a different element: sweetness here, a hint of a bite there, some flavor, some complexity.
With the meal, I drink Irouléguy, the wine of the Pays Basque, which is made from the sturdy but rather inelegant Tannat grape. (Later, I will have a transcendent bottle of this wine, made by Michel Riouspeyrous under the Domaine Arretxea label, but most Irouléguys I try are as interesting as a punch in the head.) For dessert, I have a typical Basque dish—Itxassou cherries in a compote poured over the strong goat cheese called Iraty. So intense is the flavor of the cherries that I decide to set out the following morning on a pilgrimage to Itxassou.
It isn’t much of a pilgrimage, distances being quite manageable in the Pays Basque. In 20 minutes I’m standing beside a cherry grower with the mellifluous name of Xan Estebecomena, looking out at his denuded trees. All three of the varieties unique to the area were harvested at the beginning of June, two weeks before my visit. And some have an incredibly short life span. The small, bright-colored Xapata is delicious for eating, but spoils easily. “They’re only good for two days, and they only ripen during that window in June,” says Estebecomena, one of 15 growers belonging to a cherry-producing cooperative. “People from Bordeaux to Toulouse come just to taste them.”
The other two varieties, Peloa and Beltxa, are dark and black, and live on through the year as cherry compote. Estebecomena gives me a jar, then sends me off to the restaurant at the Hôtel du Pont d’Enfer, in Bidarry, for lunch.
To get to the hotel, I cross a medieval bridge spanning a small river. The restaurant itself isn’t much to look at, with a cigarette machine stuck in the corner and advertising in Lucite stands on the tables. The cuisine is billed as rustic, and nobody is wearing a sport coat, much less a suit. Yet, as it turns out, Estebecomena knows food as well as he does cherries. My lunch borders on magnificence.
I have local white asparagus, a spongy mushroom pâté of startling intensity, and salmis de palombe, a fricassee of wild pigeon. The pigeon meat is the color of clay, and the rich brown sauce, made with Madiran wine, makes me call for another basket of bread to soak up all I can. I struggle with the knife and fork, then give up and grasp the pigeon in my hands, tearing off hunks of meat with my teeth. My server, the chef’s daughter, nods with approval. “Like a Basque,” she says.
Any visitor to the Pays Basque will eventually pass through St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, or Doninane Garazi to the Basques, who have spelled out their version of the name in flowers on a hillside in the city center. Propitiously located near the end of a mountain pass from Spain and at the intersection of three main highways and a river, it serves as the unofficial capital of the region. And Les Pyrénées is the best place to bunk within an hour’s drive. There are postcard racks and souvenir shops along the town’s main street, but also genuine bustle in the air, as if its citizens are going about important business.
The restaurant at Les Pyrénées lost one of its two Michelin stars this year, but by all accounts, the food is as it has been for decades. Firmin Arrambide started cooking in his father’s kitchen at the hotel when he was 15, which was 39 years ago. His meals don’t qualify as Basque cooking exactly, but as cooking born of one Basque’s love of gastronomy. “Things don’t have to be absolutely Basque to make Basque food,” he says. “I take ingredients I like and I make dishes; I put Basque touches in what you’d call European dishes.”
So my salad of panfried crayfish is served with a rich sauce of those ubiquitous Espelette peppers. A piece of sea bass, as meaty, moist, and noble as any steak, comes with beautifully undercooked local vegetables (artichokes, lima beans, and peas) that aren’t a mere accompaniment but an integral part of the whole. For dessert, cheese and cherries are paired with grape and walnut bread that seems almost Scandinavian. Drinking a glass of local pear eau-de-vie, I nibble at exquisite petits fours (and a miniature crème brûlée in a pan fit for a dollhouse), then watch dusk settle over the terrace. It isn’t difficult to understand why the Basques want to preserve their heritage—and their way of life.
That thought recurs at a festival in the town of Hasparren when I watch a game of pelota. Five players on each of two teams, one outfitted in red and one in white, scatter across a blacktop as long as a football field with a high wall at each end and fling a hard ball back and forth (with wicker baskets or paddles or just their hands) until someone drops it and a point is recorded. Later, outside the Relais des Tilleuls, in the town center, I drink a beer as children in berets dance a Saut basque, which is like the elegant Catalonian sardana set on fast-forward. I can be nowhere else in the world.
With the beer, I try a slice of the sweetly salty jambon de Bayonne, which tastes like most any other good-quality ham. What I really want, I’m told, is Ibaïona ham, which is much rarer—there are only three producers who make it. Luckily, one of them, Louis Ospital, has his factory in Hasparren, so off I go.
Ospital is short and balding, dressed in jeans and a madras shirt. He explains that whereas jambon de Bayonne is made from a six-month-old pig that has eaten, as pigs are wont to do, whatever has come its way, Ibaïona comes from year-old pigs fed only cereal. Their meat is coated with a mixture of sea salt, garlic, and—sure enough—Espelette peppers, then hung for months in cold storage. After four to six more months at room temperature, Ospital rubs the Ibaïona hams with a flavorless red pepper from Spain. “Everything here has to be red, white, or green, the colors of the Basque flag, or it won’t sell,” he says.
Ibaïona tastes nothing like jambon de Bayonne or Italy’s prosciutto or Spain’s patanegra. It’s more like a country ham, a Christmas ham, but stronger, saltier. I don’t much care for it on the first bite, but by the third I adore it. “Very few restaurants serve it,” Ospital says when I ask where I might eat it again.
Fortunately, the Auberge de la Galupe is one of them. In the town of Urt on the region’s northern border, it’s set in a 17th-century whitewashed house with a stone floor. The chef, Christian Parra, worked at New York City’s Rainbow Room in the 1960s. He’s half Basque, half Béarnais, a huge man who roams the floor restlessly checking on his patrons. I eat a six-course meal in which each dish is perfectly prepared (though not by Parra, who never leaves my sight).
I have panfried mullet and then domesticated pigeon, which bears approximately the same relation to the wild pigeon I ate at the Pont d’Enfer that Arthur Miller does to Dennis Miller. I have ravioli with duck and local foie gras—and, as part of an artichoke ragout, morsels of Ibaïona ham, more delicate this time, but unmistakable. I stagger out into the sunshine at four o’clock, ready to play some pelota myself, if I only knew how.
On my last night in the Pays Basque, Spain and France are contesting an elimination match of the European soccer championship. I find myself in Chez Pablo, a one-room restaurant in the overgrown fishing village of St.-Jean-de-Luz. The televised match is on in the kitchen, and servers rush into the dining room with updates. Five miles from the Spanish border, Chez Pablo serves what purports to be Spanish food. The owner’s grandmother had fled Bilbao when Franco assumed power in the 1930s and gone into business cooking the food of her homeland. I order a salad and a Spanish omelet, but the omelet is like nothing I’ve tasted, in Spain or anywhere else. It has onions and, yes, Espelette peppers—though not in the classic piperade that usually accompanies a Basque omelet, but laid across the top like Spanish sweet peppers. The tomato sauce underneath tastes like (and perhaps is) ketchup. I eat it with sangría, relishing every odd, multicultural bite.
The chef, who is also the owner, is uncertain of her soccer allegiance. “I have mixed blood and mixed emotions,” she says, which strikes me as a succinct description of modern Basqueness. There are Basques on both teams, but there is, of course, no Basque team. As I finish my sangría, I hear a whoop of joy from the kitchen. One team or the other has scored a goal, I know—but which one, it is impossible to say.
Traveling the High-Low Country
When calling the Pays Basque from the U.S., dial 011-33 before the numbers below, and drop the zero before the first 5.
The Basques are food-obsessed people—it’s said that they spend a greater proportion of their paycheck on restaurant meals than any other ethnic group in the world, and almost every dining establishment in Basque territory is worth a visit.
For simple atmosphere and carefully prepared versions of local favorites such as veal stew and wild pigeon, try Restaurant du Pont d’Enfer (Bidarry; 05-59-37-70-88). In Aïnhoa you’ll find great food at the Hôtel Ithurria (05-59-29-92-11), and in Sare at the Hôtel Arraya (05-59-54-20-46).
The region also has its share of Michelin-starred restaurants—nine at last count. The lone two-star is Christian Parra’s Auberge de la Galupe, just off the quay in Urt (05-59-56-21-84), with fine renditions of Basque, Beárnais, and French dishes. The one-star Table des Frères Ibarboure(chemin de Ttaliénia; 05-59-54-81-64), home to some of the most evolved plates of seafood around, is tucked into a residential area in Bidart, between Biarritz and St.-Jean-de-Luz. Try the rich codfish ravioli in vegetable broth, and a tuna “carpaccio” with phyllo in Asian spices. And chef Firmin Arrambide’s Basque-influenced takes on of classic French food make Les Pyrénées, in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port (place du Général de Gaulle; 05-59-37-01-01), the standard for Pays Basque dining. (The rooms at this Relais & Châteaux property in an 18th-century inn border on the garish, but they’re still better than anything else around.)
For accommodations in the village of St.-Jean-de-Luz, Hôtel-Golf de Chantaco (route d’Ascain; 05-59-26-14-76), an old and somewhat forbidding mansion set beside a formidable golf course, is the most lavish. A better choice might be one of the small hostelries by the port, such as La Marisa (16 rue Sopite; 05-59-26-95-46). The rooms are small, but the management are friendly and speak English.
Town festivals play a large role in the social life of the area. Call the Aquitaine tourist office in Bordeaux (05-56-01-70-00) to learn where and when you can don a beret and dance a Saut basque.
Low-cost carrier RyanAir (London Gatwick; 011-44-541-56-95-69; www.ryanair.com) serves some of the second-tier cities of Europe and has made travel to the Basque country easier than ever, with nonstops from London Gatwick and similar outposts. Don’t bother with the $5 sandwich from the vending carts in the middle of the aisle: The food, any food, will be better once you arrive. —B.S.