Eneko Atxa is the chef of Azurmendi in Larrabetzu, Spain. When I spoke with him for The Luxury of Attention, Azurmendi held three Michelin stars and was recognized internationally for its sustainable practice.
Atxa speaks in the book to the tension at the center of Chapter 11: how a kitchen keeps earning its reputation without being captured by it. His answer is a daily discipline rather than a strategic decision. Before opening the restaurant every day, he told me, the team must divest itself of every accolade from the day before, the month before and the year before.
“We must feel naked of prestige, and we must earn that respect anew.” Eneko Atxa, chef, Azurmendi, Larrabetzu
The kitchen leaning on yesterday’s stars has stopped earning today’s. The kitchen that opens each morning naked of prestige holds the prestige longest, because it is earned again every day instead of coasted on.
He extends the same posture to how the kitchen evolves. Azurmendi does not believe in radical change from one day to the next. It believes, in his words, in reflection, in observation, and in calmness, and in constant but incremental change. His motto is that we cannot change great things. I read the two ideas as working together. Constant but incremental change is the discipline of evolution, in which the menu, the technique and the room are continuously refined without any single change disturbing the kitchen’s recognizable identity. We cannot change great things is the discipline of restraint: knowing which elements have already reached a standard worth protecting and refusing to disturb them in the name of progress.
“Every single dish we make ends up being different from its initial idea. Dishes are alive. They are never finished.” Eneko Atxa, chef, Azurmendi, Larrabetzu
The naked of prestige posture also answers the succession question. A kitchen earning its reputation again every day is training its senior team in the disciplines that produce it, so when the founder eventually departs the disciplines remain in the team. Staying true has a cost, and Atxa pays it daily: the kitchen could optimize harder for the audit cycle and chooses not to. He keeps Azurmendi anchored in the Basque region’s ingredients and rituals because that is what the kitchen is.
In the book, Eneko Atxa appears in Chapter 11, Staying True, on earning prestige anew each day and on incremental change, and in Chapter 14, The Future of Luxury and Craft, where sustainability, which he has built his kitchen around for years, is described as having moved past the marketing phase to become table stakes for the upper end of the field.