Andoni Luis Aduriz

Andoni Luis Aduriz is a Basque chef from San Sebastián (Donostia), born in 1971. He trained at the Escuela de Cocina de San Sebastián and spent his formative years in some of the most important Basque kitchens of the late 20th century: Akelarre under Pedro Subijana, Martín Berasategui's restaurant in Lasarte, and most decisively in 1993–1995 at Ferran Adrià's elBulli in Catalonia, where he absorbed the experimental, science-informed cooking style that would shape his own career.

In 1998 he opened Mugaritz in a converted farmhouse on the border between the towns of Errenteria and Astigarraga, twenty minutes inland from San Sebastián. The restaurant takes its name from the Basque words muga (border) and aritz (oak), referring to a centuries-old oak tree on the property line. Mugaritz earned its first Michelin star in 2000 and its second in 2005, and entered the top ten of The World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2006, where it has remained almost continuously since. In 2010 a serious kitchen fire forced the restaurant to close for five months, and the resulting reopening pushed Aduriz further toward radical experimentation.

Mugaritz is organised around an unusually long off-season research period (four to five months each year), during which Aduriz and his team — including a permanent in-house I+D (research and development) team and external collaborators including food scientists, perfumers and designers — develop the following season's menu from scratch. The cooking is often confrontational: edible stones (potatoes coated in grey clay), 'tabacco' candy made from fungus, courses designed to provoke discomfort, dishes built around silence or specific noises. Aduriz has said openly that Mugaritz is more interested in being interesting than in being liked.

He co-founded the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastián in 2011, one of the most important culinary schools in Europe, and runs additional casual concepts including Topa Sukaldería (Basque-Latin American cooking) in San Sebastián.