Cheesecake Wars and Western Europe Delights 🍰
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start reading a newsletter issue that's basically made of random notes about my latest journey across France through Northern Spain
Hi there!
As you may have noticed, I took a longer hiatus than I had expected because I was much more drained than I’d realized before starting my holiday journey.
I bet that happens to everyone sooner or later.
With that in mind, I’d like to share some of the best food-related experiences I had while stopping in Lyon, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Bilbao, Pamplona, Santander, and San Sebastián.
It wasn’t exactly a proper food tour, but I did discover a few things worth sharing.
Hope you enjoy.
Piero
✹Juan Mari Arzak, Diez Horas con Juan Mari Arzak, probably speaking about me. This one is a book that will make you think twice before cooking cod. Juan Mari Arzak is a pioneering Spanish chef from San Sebastián, widely regarded as one of the founders of Spain’s New Basque Cuisine. His restaurant, Arzak, earned three Michelin stars and became internationally renowned for its innovative, modern interpretation of Basque cooking. I bought this book at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao because: isn't cooking an art, after all?
Cokking is caring
Love and Hunger is Charlotte Wood's ode to simple, unfussy cooking. The Australian author distills what she's learned about food, creativity, and care in the kitchen. First published in 2012, it pushes back against food-world perfectionism with warmth and practicality. It now arrives in the UK via Sceptre, with a foreword by Nigella Lawson (I link to her website so you get one author's recipe).
Love and Hunger by Charlotte Wood
→ Shortplot: 🥔 🇦🇺 🍷 🥧
Stop that cheesecake?
I saw the signs myself, on a wall in San Sebastián's old town. "Stop cheesecake". At first it made me laugh. Then it didn't.
The Basque burnt cheesecake (★recipe), the one everyone lines up for at La Viña, was invented in 1988. Not centuries ago. Not by grandmothers. By a bar owner named Santiago Rivera, who just wanted something simple to serve with the pintxos.
Thirty years later, it's on menus from Istanbul to Tokyo, tagged a million times on Instagram, crowned "flavor of the year" by the New York Times. And now it's a symbol locals use to talk about something else entirely: their city disappearing under other people's appetite for it.
That's the part that stuck with me. The cheesecake isn't the enemy. It's shorthand. San Sebastián has seen real protests against overtourism, residents marching under banners that call the city "suffocating," demanding fewer tourist flats, fewer hotel licenses, some room to breathe.
A dessert invented three decades ago, in a bar, for regulars, is now the punchline for a much older complaint: when a place becomes a product, who gets priced out of living in it. I don't know if "stop cheesecake" was ever an official slogan or just one person's cardboard sign. But it didn't need to be official.
It said exactly what it needed to say.
LYON🇫🇷
🐡Quenelle de Brochet with sauce Nantua (★recipe, it looks like this). This is basically a pike fish-cake served oven-baked with a peculiar sauce made with local crayfish. It's even crazier I ordered that when it was 36°C out there. It's comfort food that brings me back to Eighties Christmas parties when some French cooking leaked into your house. I enjoyed that with a fresh Côtes du Rhône.
BORDEAUX🇫🇷
🍷The surprise was the interactive museum called La cité du vin, shaped like a decanter and full of funny things to know better vines and wines. After the visit you can try wines, and I had these two (one local and one afar): Château Haut Bonneau - Vieilles Vignes Montagne Saint Emilion and one incredible Doña Paula Selección de Bodega Malbec (from Argentina).
LA TESTE DE BUCH🇫🇷
🦪This stop was meant for one thing: local oysters N°2, 3, and 4. I had a relaxed tasting at Le Sahoutou, among the fisherman's cabanes. Honest prices, very happy about the detour. Rule of thumb: if you can stop somewhere good for oysters, always do.
BIARRITZ🇫🇷
🌶️Getting close to the Basque Country I had an anticipation with Txistorra (★recipe, if you're into butchery), the slim and hot sausage that reigns over there. The twist was having that fried. It's the classical ingredient you probably can't have at home any moment. We're in the hyperlocal territory.
PAMPLONA🇪🇸
🥚Here's where things got exciting. Imagine a bar who made its name for a bechamelle croqueta with a whole egg inside. A place where a digital counter tells you that 2,133,815 eggs were served since January 17th 2015. This was Vermutería Río and the Huevos rebozados (★recipe with tuna) are something.
BILBAO🇪🇸
If you know me, you know I try skipping places located in main streets and famous squares. I had to make an exception for the iconic Café Bar Bilbao an its pintxos: you have to feel the vibe and order according to your curiosity. Exception number two: beautiful, old style, Café Iruña: I bet if you're a local you wouldn't go there, but first time in Bilbao, why not? I mean, look at the décor. Plus the food was very good and fairly priced.
SANTANDER🇪🇸
We're in the Cantabrian Anchovies area. Had not time for the whole Cantabrian cooking tour. Then I wento for Rabas, aka local fried squids (★recipe). I reckon they go for large and long chunks. I had also battered sardines (★recipe, mine were slightly different) that were simply perfect. Must get back there.
SAN SEBASTIAN🇪🇸
There's much to say about this place and I could not go as deep as the area deserves. But you get the juice with this: La Cuchara de San Telmo is a hot pintxos place. You order half a portion (go with this) or a portion of something and in a total mess of people eating or waiting in line you get a 1/2 Michelin Star restaurant dish. The Pork Cheek and the Roasted Baby Pork (Cotxinillo lechal asado, ★recipe). Everything is even better than you see in these images, and even messier. After you've eaten some young hoofed mammals, you could crave some potato tortilla (★recipe) or a sandwich: you can get both at Juantxo Taberna. You should go there. I'm skipping the basque cheesecake because I find it controversial, but I already wrote about that.
Food Tourism Is Dead, but Something More Interesting Is Emerging
Brian Lee / The New York Times
You don't need to fly to Tokyo for Tsukiji-grade fish anymore, since the same catch already lands nightly at Masa in New York and Sushi Zo in LA. That's the opening jab of this essay: food tourism, as a genre, has eaten itself. What the author argues comes next, the real frontier isn't a destination anymore, it's the diaspora kitchens quietly rewriting cuisines in Madrid, Stockholm, and Toronto. Smart angle, I don't agree.
