An old saying states: “There are two types of Basques: those who do not speak and those who do not keep quiet”.
Iñigo Pérez (Villarreal de Urrechua —now Urretxu—, Guipúzcoa, 51 years old) bursts out laughing when he listens to him, because he recognizes that he belongs to the second group.
He is from the school of passionate, talkative and expansive cooks to which Karlos Arguiñano or his teacher and friend, Martín Berasategui, with whom he started when he was 17, also belong.
He baptized him with the nickname by which he is known: Urrechu, after the town in which he was born.
Today, Iñigo Urrechu has seven restaurants, the last one being the mythical Zalacaín in Madrid, the first Spanish establishment to obtain three Michelin stars, in 1987, when there were only 12 establishments in that category in the world, eight of them in France.
Urrechu acquired it only a year ago, when that historic place,
Ask.
Chef, cook, businessman... How do you define yourself?
Answer:
Cook.
I am an entrepreneur because I am the son of an entrepreneur.
He had three pesetas saved and being a businessman is, in the end, a life situation.
I had money, I invested it and that's it.
But my profession is cook.
P.
_
Why not chef?
R.
I don't know, it seems a little more bombastic to me, very pretentious.
Pedantic even.
I consider myself a cook because I cut myself and no blood comes out, I smell rosemary, thyme, I have the kitchen inside.
Q:
At what point did you decide to be a chef?
R.
_
We from the north have a very nice word that is
sirimiri,
that fine rain that soaks you without you realizing it.
I think I have had a gastronomic
sirimiri
, I am the youngest of three brothers who are many years older than me.
They went about their business and I stayed with the
aitatxos
[the parents] at home, playing in the kitchen.
That soaks.
Q.
It started with Berasategui.
R.
I was not admitted to the cooking school in San Sebastián, I wanted to learn and they told me about a young boy who really wanted to, a certain Martín Berasategui who had neither a star nor hosts.
I entered and grew little by little.
I was the first chef in his quarry.
We got the first Michelin star, then the second and then I went to France to a three star.
P.
It seems unbelievable now that chefs are stars, but then it still sounded strange that a kid wanted to be a chef.
R.
Very rare, it is true.
And that in the Basque Country there was a lot of gastronomic culture due to gastronomic societies.
Outside of that it had to be tremendous.
But even so, wanting to dedicate yourself to professional cooking then was something strange.
In my town they looked at me as if I were the fool.
Q.
What talents does a cook have to have?
R.
You have to have a series of guidelines.
My life is governed by three rules: criteria, perseverance and humility.
To have criteria you have to train.
Constancy is basic.
Even if you don't have a gift for sports, if you train a discipline every holy day, in the end you will be a beast.
Humility means that I will never be more important than the challenge that I set for myself.
P.
I can buy that cooking is a trade that is learned, but something will have to be standard.
A.
Yes, of course.
In my case, my wife tells me that I have a dog's sense of smell, that I smell everything.
And it is true that I have something in smell.
For example, a broth, to know if it has salt, is tasted, not smelled.
Well, I perceive it through smell, because I perceive a series of things, some invisible points of value.
Chef Iñigo Urrechu in the kitchen of his Urrechu Velázquez restaurant in Madrid.
jaime villanueva
Q.
Is it true that you know the names of your 258 employees?
R.
Everyone, everyone.
Because they are not employees, for me they are colleagues.
In many cases I know the names of their partners and children.
Q.
I asked a food critic how to define it.
He told me: “He is a smart guy who was innovative when he had to be and now he knows that what works is classicism properly understood”
R.
I agree with everything except that I'm smart, I'm average.
The point is that gastronomy is moving towards spherifications, foams, technical things that I also do, but for me it is not modern cuisine, it is cuisine with current techniques.
For me, modern is one that is on the horse of what the client demands today.
For example, you have to have a staging and, why not say it, you have to make an
Instagrammable
kitchen because everyone is busting to eat in a nice place.
P.
Was that the recipe to overcome the crisis?
R.
The crisis was hard.
Several friends told me.
“Hey, Urrechu, but how do you keep the restaurant full?
The business public no longer comes, the cards are gone, the visas have been removed...”.
And one day I told them: “Look, this is very simple: There was a type of customer that was the one with company cards, which was 50%;
and the other 50% were other types of customers.
Okay, if you keep thinking about how to recover the client of the visas and of the companies that have collapsed because they are in crisis, you will sink with them.
I had to reinvent myself thinking about what people demand.
Before they spent money, now they invest the money.
Each meal that is being paid for is an investment.
That investment is what I have to understand.
So I have to strike a balance between cooking with current techniques and cooking with traditional flavors.
In other words, motherfucking flavors, flavors of a lifetime, frightening flavors, flavors that evoke the past in the hypothalamus.
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