AzurmendiA glass building set into the hillside, the menu opening with a picnic at the door

The house comes first, then the menu

Larrabetzu, Bizkaia, Spain — One menu through five rooms.

The building was costed in resources before it was built: rain is collected and fed back to the garden and the greenhouse, daylight is used instead of lamps, and temperature and ventilation are held by the construction to cut how much air conditioning runs. What the kitchen can get each day is decided by those same conditions in reverse: grown inside the building, grown on the slope, picked that morning, filtered by the house before it ever reaches a menu. The building came first, the menu follows it. The green on the roof, the vineyard on the slope and the seedlings in the greenhouse are all saying the same thing.

The menu is divided by place, not by course. A picnic first, then the kitchen, then the stretch where things are growing, then back to the table for something sweet. Guests move with the food, so a meal walks the building from one end to the other.

Eneko Atxa wrote a line for the house: take hold of your roots, and only then dare to dream, to set out, to know a piece of land, and to fly back to the same starting point. Azurmendi is his home. The names on the menu, Betizu, txakoli, beans from Gernika, are local words.

A house on the slope

The restaurant stands on a slope in Bizkaia. Its own description is a bioclimatic building set into the hillside with a vineyard of native grapes: half of it buried, half of it carried out on structure, the valley side in glass, vegetation laid over the roof, and a sustainability centre built into the same volume.

The house generates part of its own electricity and offsets part of what it draws. The car park has sockets for charging electric cars, and more than eight hundred trees have been planted on the slope to hold down carbon dioxide. Some of the vegetables and herbs the kitchen needs are grown in the greenhouse inside the building.

The restaurant opened somewhere else and came into this house later, once it had been built. Since the move, the greenhouse, the dining room and the room given to sustainability research have been under one roof.

One menu, five places

There is one menu, the Gran Menú, and the whole table starts it together. It is divided by place rather than by course, and the sections are printed on it: Welcome picnic, The kitchen table, The garden, Viewpoint, and then dessert.

Bread is baked in house. The milk bread comes from Juan Zabala's farmhouse, a larger loaf comes alongside it and there is corn bread from Mungia; herbs, buds and some of the vegetables are picked or grown by the team each day. Before the sweet end a cheese trolley is wheeled over, carrying Spanish and imported cheeses in season.

The version on the website is an example, and the restaurant keeps the right to change it with the seasons; the day itself may bring something different. For champagne there is a separate version that fits three champagnes into the menu, which the site describes as this menu with the essence of Dom Pérignon.