Inaki Aizpitarte

Inaki Aizpitarte’s biography, acclaimed leader of the so called bistronomy movement, sounds like a picaresque tale: born in Besançon from Spanish relatives fleeing from Franco dictatorship, when 18, orphan of his father, he quit his high school with empty pockets. He played then different jobs: stone carver, landscape painter in Dax with his uncle and finally oenology student for 5 years in Bordeaux. Later he flew to Tel Aviv to work as a dishwasher in a Serbian restaurant, where he learns all the bases to build up his real job. Back in France, the consecration: chef de partie of at Café des Délices, owned by Gilles Choukroun,Omnivore ’s ubiquitous chef beur.

Then, the La Famille bistrot, a controversial center of innovations in Montmartre where he got noticed by many. In 2005 he started working as a chef at Transversal, the Mac/Val, Vitry-sur-Seine’ s museum of contemporary art but one years later he was already employed by his friend Frédéric Peneau, who just purchased Chateaubriand, a bistrot with a Thirties design that he had stepped in accidentally. That was a fate move.

Travel lover, from Asia to Center America passing through Middle East, Inaki is a self-taught chef following instinct, fantasy and improvisation on a menu that changes every day. Freshness, simplicity and most of all the freedom of a nonconformist, gipsy and clandestine style, paint him has a maître à penser on the French scene. «I strive to create alive recipes, which at first clash but then meet together well», he says illustrating this scheme of contrasts that dissolve in time. In the meantime his family went back to Bask countries where Inaki himself always flees whenever he can. For gastronomic purposes, to tell it all: «My mother cooks simply and well, a style that always inspires me», he says running through the anamnesis of his culinary virus. Best foreign chef according to Identità Golose’s 2011 Guide.