MUGARITZ (Rest.)

*****
Mugaritz,ranked at fourth place in the Top Five, is lionized as this great rustic restaurant where the chefs tend the gardens, using tweezers to pick herbs and edible flowers that adorn almost every dish. So it's a surprise to find it surrounded by a car park that is many times bigger than the restaurant's vegetable plot.

Inside the big dining room is sparsely scattered with tables of which not all are full on this Saturday night. This is put down to the last night of a Basque pride festival in San Sebastian and a soccer match between local heroes Real Sociedad and the might of the re-invigorated Real Madrid. This has seen the streets round the soccer stadium turned into a sea of blue and white stripes; the air thick with the sounds of chanting and the parping of jaunty brass bands.

Arriving at 9pm everything at Mugaritz in the green hills about the town is far, far quieter. In fact it looked like the restaurant might be even emptier than that but the diners here arrive very late by Australian standards. They are an eclectic mix of foodie tourists, genuflecting young chefs from across Europe and far less of the posh perma-tanned blazer-wearing types seenat Can Roca and El Bulli.

With pitchfork iconography on the walls and smooth wooden axe-handles that hold the obliquely writtenmenu, the intention is clearly to anchor the rustic notion that, whileAduriz might have started as a modernist disciple of Adria, he is nowmore closely a follower of the land and the sea that surrounds him.

The 11 course menu they prepare for us skips across some of Aduriz's greatest hits. Tiny feather-weight gnocchi made with kudzu starch and flavored with tangy local Idiazabal cheese float in a pristine porkbroth. They follow a busy jumble of sprouts, greens and flower petalsdressed with nutty brown butter and with a thin milky soup that tastes of Emmental cheese.

Flowers, wild greens and herbs seem to be everywhere. A miniscule dice of squid and carrots in a squid broth comes strewn with delicate white carrot blossoms. I didn't ever know carrots flowered. That garden bowl is loaded with different basils and the surprisingly sweet petals of lily and marigold amongst the buds. Later a fillet of mild white bonito tuna, from the Bay of Biscay that snuggles in to Spain's northern shores, comes with strands of succulent samphire and something called sea chamomile. This love of edible flowers and foraged wild ingredients is something Aduriz shares withhis Scandinavian counterpart, Rene Redzepi at Noma who sits above himin the Top Five.

Local fish like that bonito abound. There's turbot served with the fat peeled stalks of an English cottage garden herb called borage. The Basques also love - in the way that some Cantonese value fish cheeks - kokotxa which are fish throats, or lowerjaws - often of hake. Here Aduriz presents a kokotxa of salt cod whichhas all the salty funkiness of the dried fish but in a silken slip that resembles milk skin. It needs more sweetness from an acacia honey that's used as a counterpoint on the dish but it is a fine example one of Aduriz's mantras - so often couched as a question. What can we say with as few elements as possible ?

The guys at Mugaritz also loves a gag. To start the meal a bowl of warm stones is presented. Some are actually potatoes covered in a grey edible clay. A whole battery of alarm bells go off as you bite into one. Your fingers and your teethboth convinced by the feel that this is a little rock. It is the first in a number of provocative gags that Aduriz plays on the diner. The meal ends with a piece of blackened veal that looks like it has spent 3 hours too long on the BBQ but which is actually dyed to look burnt but is pink when cut and fine to eat. Then after a selection of palate-warmers, what looks like a beef carpaccio arrives but the meat is very sweet under a rubble of walnuts and salty parmesan-like hard cheese grains (Idiazabal). It is another joke. It's not beef at all but watermelon dehydrated until it is the colour and texture of sliced fillet. After the mandatory trip to the kitchen to meet the chefs, maitre d' Jose Ramon Calvo riffs, “We are a terrible restaurant we serve our guests stones and burnt meat!”

The funniest joke of all however is not culinary at all. It's the two envelopes every diner finds at their place asking them to choose whether they want to “rebel”or “submit” with their choice of menu and that the kitchen will then give them either 150 minutes of embarrassment and submission or of discovery and contemplation. Making the choice provokes conversationand engagement with the coming meal - only all reviews of the restaurant begin by debating this conundrum - but Andoni is playing with their heads. I ask Josera how the two menus differ, “They don't!” smiles Jose.

It is just another example of that provoke and joke philosophy; the real question is however whether the choice made impacts on how the menu is perceived differently by either group ofdiners.

Veg quota for the week met at Mugaritz we fill the next day eating achingly fresh fish adorned with little more than a rough emulsion of oil and vinegar or lemon at two of Josera and Andoni's favourite local traditional restaurants. Hake throats, fat clams and wood roasted turbot at Kai-pe overlooking the little fishing port down the coast at Getaria, and at La Rampa on the quay in Donostia-San Sebastian. Here it is kiss-sweet calamari and grilled groper while none other that Pedro Subijana sits at the table behind us. Behind us in the old town lines of giant two-storey figurines dance and twirl through the narrow streets of the old town fanning the last embers of that Basque week