Vamos! Sagardi is the best Spanish restaurant around right now
Do you love Spanish cuisine, pintxos, unparalleled fish and meat dishes? Then you absolutely have to go to Sagardi, because here you’ll find the most beautiful products from the Basque Country prepared in the best possible way: on Sagardi’s uniquely designed, one-of-a-kind Basque grill.
Basque powerhouse
Sagardi is better than your Spanish holiday romance, I wrote last year after visiting this Basque powerhouse. And a year later, I’m still just as euphoric. Sagardi is amazing, believe me. Since opening their very first restaurant in Barcelona, more than 25 years ago, brothers and chefs Iñaki and Mikel López de Viñaspre have taken the dishes of their Basque grandmothers beyond their own homes; worldwide, there are now eleven Sagardi locations, with (multiple) branches in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, as well as Sagardi restaurants in Buenos Aires, Porto and London. And, of course, in Amsterdam (on Spuistraat).
Superb pintxos
Naturally, we begin as we should: with pintxos; as soon as you walk in, you’ll come across the pintxos bar. Pintxos are an essential part of Basque culture. A pintxo is a slice of baguette with a varied topping, secured to the bread with a stick (palillo). The menu features a variety of hot and cold pintxos, and displayed on the counter, they look fantastic. The generously topped pintxos all cost €2.75 each, which is an exceptionally good price for this quality. Two tips: the Sidreria omelette with cod and the fried Txistorra pintxos (a bright-red Spanish sausage made with local ingredients added to the meat, including ground pimentón).
Esentzia Sagardi
You can eat à la carte at Sagardi, but adventurous diners can also opt for the special ‘Esentzia Sagardi’ menu. This menu changes four times a year, with one product taking center stage each time. The first edition, running until November 28, is dedicated entirely to Galician beef more than ten years old, carefully aged for 30 days. Mikel López de Viñaspre, chef and co-founder of Sagardi, and Gregorio Tolosa, chef of Bidea2 in Pamplona, created a special six-course menu for the very first Esentzia Sagardi, allowing you to experience how cooking over a fire can add extra flavor to a product and how this method can turn even less common cuts of meat and fish into first-class ingredients.
Beef tongue sandwich
The special menu begins with a beef tongue sandwich. Beef tongue is the most mobile muscle in cattle, which makes it wonderfully tender when prepared properly. And they certainly know how to do that here, as becomes clear immediately. The bread is lightly crunchy, while the mustard, together with the pickles, brings the dish beautifully into balance.
Roll with it!
Next comes a dish consisting of aged beef carpaccio with red prawns from Palamós (a municipality in the Spanish province of Girona, in Catalonia). You roll up the dish for the ultimate flavor experience. We drink a fresh white wine alongside it, L’Equilibrista, made from xarel-lo, one of the three grapes used in the blend for cava, the well-known sparkling wine from (northern) Spain. A delicious combination with the dish!
Umami bomb: shaved tuna heart
Sometimes you come across a dish that completely knocks you sideways. The steak tartare with ‘Almadraba’-caught tuna heart from Barbate is one of those dishes. In other words: beef tartare with shaved tuna heart. Yes, you read that correctly: tuna heart. And it isn’t scary—it’s delicious. It resembles bottarga (dried mullet roe) and is dried in the wind in southern Spain for months, making it very hard and salty, so that it can be shaved. And that produces an incredibly umami-rich flavor.
Special tuna catch: la Almadraba
The tuna for this dish is sustainably caught in Barbate in April, May and June, using an age-old method called ‘la Almadraba’, invented by the Phoenicians around 3,000 years ago. For this catch, nets are positioned in the sea where the tuna travel from the Atlantic Ocean toward the warmer waters of the Mediterranean. The tuna are guided through a maze of nets until they become trapped in a netted enclosure, surrounded by fishing boats. The tuna can be up to 3 meters long and weigh more than 500 kilos, and are brought in by experienced Almadraba fishermen. Only the large fish are kept for consumption; the smaller fish are released back into the water. This method helps maintain healthy fish stocks.
Sweetbreads with mushrooms
The perfectly prepared sweetbreads with mushrooms are covered in a delicious sticky sauce and served with homemade sourdough bread (fermented for 48 hours) for mopping up every last bit of sauce from your plate.
King of the grill
But the absolute showstopper is the Txuleton with seasonal piquillos, prepared by Gregorio Tolosa on the Basque grill. Gregorio’s restaurant Bidea2 in Pamplona received two Repsol Suns, the prestigious culinary distinction awarded to the best restaurants in Spain and Portugal. His nickname is ‘King of the grill’, and simply watching his grilling-skills is impressive—before you’ve even started eating. I don’t eat meat often, but when I do, it has to be good meat, and this is exactly that. What a flavor!
The meat needs nothing more than flakes of salt. It is served with a simple but deliciously fresh and tangy salad and a plate of piquillo peppers, the ‘star among peppers’, whose flesh is red and sweet.
We finish with a dessert based on a recipe by Pierre Hermé, who has run Maison Pierre Hermé since 1998, a pastry shop in Paris that is utterly irresistible. In 2016, he won the award for the world’s best pastry chef. All of which is to say: this is a delectable dessert of vanilla ice cream with caramel and charred, caramelized pineapple. As a bonus: a small glass of the famous Tokaji Aszú, a dessert wine made from overripe grapes.
Go on, it’s delicious
Sagardi is open every day from 12:00 to 23:00. The regular menu is packed with Spanish delights. The special ‘Esentzia Sagardi’ menu is available until November 28 (€85, only available for a minimum of two people).
Sagardi, Spuistraat 304, Amsterdam
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