I know now that my mother was as disturbed by rotisserie du Thumper as I was. It didn’t occur to me to eat one until, in my 20s on a trip to Florence with my mother, I found myself in a rustic osteria where whole golden rabbits turned on iron spits, row above row. My first experience with them was when, with other children, I was brought to a dull little farm with cages containing cotton-balls of fluff that we held in our laps, aggressively smoothing their flimsy ears. (If you were raised European, or married one, this is not you.) I didn’t grow up thinking of rabbits as food. Here, sensitive souls who consider it monstrous to eat rabbits should stop reading. This, I think crossly, is sens dessus dessous: We’re planning to cook a rabbit, and I, not it, am running behind. On the side of the restaurant, though, is a long garden, fragrant and damp, full of chervil and nasturtiums, cardoons and myrtles, which is where I currently am, sweater snagged on a thistle, searching fruitlessly for a way in, mumbling about being very late. I had to stop for fuel on the way from San Sebastián, I neglected to search for the restaurant on a digital map, and I forgot to buy the good old Michelin kind. I’m here to cook with the chef, Andoni Luis Aduriz. On a misty, curving road in Basque Country, beside which saturnine sheep nose into tall wet grass, stands Mugaritz, one of the world’s best and most compelling restaurants, an eggshell-white building with dark wooden stairs and a terra-cotta roof.
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