Eating the body, with the body 

We insist on eating not only with our hands (privileged receptors of temperature and texture), but also with our bodies. We love seeing people intuitively use their gestures when they sit down to eat at Mugaritz. Especially when something is hard to pick up differently than how we have traditionally learned with cutlery; when something spills out or simply forces one to improvise table manners in order to take it and bring it to their mouth. In our dining room, people suck, lick, slurp, stick out their tongues, and play.

Over time, however, wondering how we can eat “parts of the body with the body” has led us to offer mouths, tongues, breasts, and even navels which can be touched, caressed, and taken advantage of for fantasies. To that end, we’ve conceptualised things like a first kiss, what it means to empathetically put yourself in someone else’s place —and skin—, what breastfeeding a baby involves, and we’ve even represented the blissfulness of ignorance with eyes that don’t see. Throughout the process, the collaboration of a number of individuals has been key, both for the creation of moulds associated with body parts and for the production of tableware or bases specifically for our passionate endeavours.

We once again have turned to the extraordinary Basque-Venezuelan potter, Ainara Garay, whose workshop in Mungia (Ainarita Cerámica) produced the plaster pieces in 2020 that were so useful for creating metaphors linked to a face (based on the face of Fran Baixas, a former member of our R&D department). In 2025, Ainara handcrafted each and every one of the plaster forearms that, placed before our guests, ring the bell of sweet temptation: that of moving with our lips along someone’s limbs, as far as our imagination can take us, only to end up imbuing the memory with toasted pine nuts and juniper berries.