Basque inflavour

In a tiny village in Spain, one man has turned the humble grill into a work of culinary art. His secret? No charcoal. You can smell what may well be the best grill restaurant in the world long before you step through the door. It's not the harsh, bitter charcoal burn that you get in the British suburbs on a warm summer's evening.

Star of Axpe

Instead, it is something lighter and sweeter — a ripe smokiness that is both gentle and enticing. It may even be the only reason you are ever likely to visit the tiny village of Axpe in the cleft of the Basque hills, a 45 minutes' drive from Bilbao. For here, in a solid rather than handsome stone building, is Etxebarri (pronounced Etchebarri), a restaurant that has no Michelin stars, uses a cooking method so basic even cavemen would recognise it and yet has become a point of pilgrimage for food nerds from around the world. Despite being ignored by the tyre company, it has popped up on the list of the 50 best restaurants in the world.

And all this because of the obsessive, often lonely pursuit of a big-shouldered, lightly paunched middle-aged man for what he regards as the purest kind of cookery possible. Put most simply, Bittor Arguinzoniz. He cooks absolutely everything over burning wood. Even the caviar and the cream.

You may regard yourself as something of a barbecue king. You know about the need to wait for the flames to die down. You understand the power of indirect heat. Maybe you like to throw a few chips of interesting timber into the white-hot ash to spice things up a bit. But compared to Arguinzoniz, you are a lightweight, little better than the caveman.

Selected for specialities

When we arrive, Arguinzoniz is in the woodshed just out the back of the kitchen, selecting logs, with which he will make his fuel. These, however, are not just any logs. He uses different woods for different ingredients. There are gnarled and twisted hunks of vines that are used for meat, I am told, because they are aromatic. For tranches of salmon, he uses pieces of old trees from the orange groves and for the delicate business of cooking the caviar, applewood. For much else, there's a local kind of oak, a slow, solid burner.

Not that he tells me any of this himself. Arguinzoniz, 49, is not a big talker. He says he will answer my questions after lunch but for now, leaves the tiresome business of conversation to his No 2, a half-Australian, half-British chef called Lennox Hastie, who worked for Michelin three-star restaurants in France and Spain before coming here three years ago, where, instead of a brigade in crisp whites, there are just the two of them in the kitchen: Hastie had found the place he wanted to be.

Arguinzoniz grew up just a short walk from the village asador, or restaurant, in a house where his mother and grandmother cooked only over wood. Although he trained as an electrician, he failed to find employment, so worked first as a lumberjack and then did his military service. At the end of that, he decided the restaurant, which had fallen on hard times, deserved a new lease of life. And in any case, cooking had always made him happy. He took over Etxebarri — the name means "new house" — almost 20 years ago. Soon he was offering a classic Basque grill menu of meat and fish cooked over charcoal.

But Arguinzoniz is a restless soul and he started experimenting. He decided charcoal was too harsh and so, around the turn of the millennium, moved backwards to the original wood and took the kitchen inside. He began fashioning metal implements with which to cook using smoke, soldering and welding the pieces together himself. The cooking range is a marvellous self-built affair: six kinds of grills with grids of different width, all of which can be raised and lowered on a pulley system. There are pans with open-mesh bases to allow the smoke to reach the ingredients and covered pots with big funnel-like holes in the middle for steaming open clams and mussels with smoke. This restaurant, Hastie tells me, is not about dishes and creations. "It's about the ingredients. Nothing else." He shows me filtration tanks full of live lobsters and crabs, and turbot still swimming about. There is a basket of slippery eels and another of oysters the size of side plates. Mushrooms and herbs are brought in by foragers and in winter, there is game shot by local huntsmen. Most of the vegetables come from Arguinzoniz's own smallholding up the hill, which is overseen by his 86-year-old father.

Two-men army

In the short pause before lunch, I ask Arguinzoniz where he is happiest, already knowing the answer. He shrugs and glances at the grill. "Here," he says. They are open for just seven services a week — six lunches and one dinner — but even so, in busy times, both of them have to work the grill. "I grew up with Aussie BBQ so I had lots of preconceptions of what grilling could be," Hastie says. "This is different. It's addictive, playing with fire. You don't use thermometers. It's all about intuition."

I head upstairs to the dining room, a vault of a space, simply decorated, with bare brick walls and a beamed ceiling, which is overseen by Arguinzoniz's wife Patricia. The menu merely lists ingredients: oysters, turbot, beef and so on. Locals come here just for a hunk of something perfectly grilled but for gastro-tourists like me, they will prepare a tasting menu, which costs from 120-200 euros (Dh656-Dh1,094). The risk, of course, is that a place like this will get hyped less because of the food than because it ticks a whole bunch of food-fetish boxes. Is it a long way from where most people happen to be? Tick. Does it scream authenticity? Tick. Is the chef a hardcore mountain boy with callused hands? Big tick. Line all that stuff up and the food need not matter. But it does. A lot.

Spread of savouries

It starts with three slices of smoked meat on toast. They bring a cube and a ball of the smoked butter they have churned by hand — it is so aromatic it can be eaten by itself, like a mousse. There is a single fat oyster cooked with extraordinary precision. There is that flavour of smoke and of fresh oyster. We have a tranche of dense eel and then some tiny baby octopus. Glossy black beads of unpasteurised, unsalted caviar have been held over the grill on seaweed — the oils just running, the flavour boosted by the smoke.

Arguinzoniz says: "It is not about the flavour of the smoke; it is about the aroma of the wood that made the smoke."

And as for the Michelin stars, he clearly doesn't care.