Rating: 
Summary: NOT ALL AUTHENTIC BASQUE RECIPES
Review: I bought this book when it first came out and was so happy to see a book on Basque cooking (there are so few written in English) and I was also influenced by all the 5 star reviews on this site. Well, after reading it carefully and preparing several recipes I feel let down. Not all the recipes are authentic Basque dishes - many are traditional Spanish dishes. Several recipes were quite bland and I can only imagine that you'd have to import the ingredients from the Basque country in order to get the results that Ms. Barrenechea describes. I am very dissapointed in this book and can not recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: NOT ALL AUTHENTIC BASQUE RECIPES
Review: I do agree with Mr. Angel Ibañez de Aldecoa. I have been to her restaurant in New York and with great sorprise I found in her menus one of my favorites recipes whose owner and creator is one of my best friends in Madrid. She should be very careful about taking recipes from real chefs or at least recognice who the creator of the recipe is. I think this book has a wide range of recipes but some of them are Spanish and not exclusivly from BASQUE COUNTRY. I think the book could be better if she were a real professional chef with great experience.
Rating:
Summary: I agree with Mr. Angel Ibañez de Aldecoa
Review: I do agree with Mr. Angel Ibañez de Aldecoa. I have been to her restaurant in New York and with great sorprise I found in her menus one of my favorites recipes whose owner and creator is one of my best friends in Madrid. She should be very careful about taking recipes from real chefs or at least recognice who the creator of the recipe is. I think this book has a wide range of recipes but some of them are Spanish and not exclusivly from BASQUE COUNTRY. I think the book could be better if she were a real professional chef with great experience.
Rating:
Summary: A mixture of Cusine, More Turistic than really BasqueCuisine
Review: I have been through her book and I found that there are some recipes which first are not really from her own creation. Some recipes are not just Basque recipes but also a very common spanish cuisine in any place of the Iberian Peninsula. Sometimes her making process is very very poor, like the TORTILLA DE PATATAS, for making that recipe you have a very special secret in order to get the most delisious and melted Tortilla, but maybe she just does not really know how to do it. by the way the Tortilla de patatas, is a Spanish dish not only Basque. It is a pitty that her recipes are not really taken from traditional basque farmhouses (caserios) in Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya, Alaba and Navarra. As she mentions the Roast Suckling Pig is a traditional dish from castile, why this recipe is in a book of Basque recipes ?. I do not think vinaigrette, mayonnaise, tomatoe sauce and the Spanish sauce, are basque recipes, specially the last on. The Piquillo Peper Sauce, it is a recipe of Nouvelle-cuisine, which never has heavy cream in the traditional way. Traditionally there was a puree made just eigther out of green Piquillo pepers or red ones (pepers from the area).
Rating: 
Summary: Really good.
Review: I have read the book and I have eaten at the restaurant.I really think that it is the best Basque restaurant in New York.I think the book is also really good. The explanations are accurate and, considering the Basque culture is complex and hard to understand, the book does a good job. I think that it does not have to be extremely sophisticated because Basque people in general are not sophisticated. The introduction is good and I do not think that it is necessary for people to visit the Basque Country in order to understand more. The book is a very good description of the cuisin in the Basque Country.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I received this wonderful book for my birthday. There is not one recipe that I have made that doesn't work beautifully. Bravo! It brings back so many memories from the years I spent in Bilbao and San Sebastian. Highly recommended!!
Rating:
Summary: Simply the BEST. Great cuisine shown in a great book.
Review: I'm sure Basque Cuisine will now be known worldwide through this excellent book. It contains the best recipes of the great Basque cuisine clearly explained.
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Summary: Thankyou Ms. Barrenechea! You are the best.
Review: It's hard to describe, for all of us lovers of the Basque Country, it's people, culture and food, and who leave in this remote part of the world the joy and excitment felt after we recived a copy of the Basque Table. The book is superb. The recipies are simple and delithful and trully reflect the heart and soul of the Country. Thankyou Ms. Barrenechea for sharing with us your very soul and for giving us the joy to live and experience the warmth, beauty and tantalizing flavors of your cuisine.
Rating: 
Summary: A cuisine well worth exploring
Review: Lovers of ethnic food, and people who are in the least adventurous in their eating habits, will love Basque food, if they don't know it already. It is delicious and unlike any other, but still not so different as to lack appeal to most people who try it (although I, for one, cannot share the Basque enthusiasm for eating baby eels). The book also contains considerable information about the the Basque country (Euzkadi), the Basques and Basque culture in general, although for a more thorough and fascinating look at the subject, I would recommend Mark Kurlandsky's "Basque History of the World". One criticism - the author now lives in New York City, where she owns several Basque restaurants. Several of the recipes call for some Basque specialties, such as Basque cheese. As her source for these, she says to try "Northern Boulevard", which is a street in Queens, New York, and gives a phone number, probably of a Basque grocery located there. Surely she could have found, and given us, a few sources for Basque ingredients for those of us who do not reside in the Big Apple. But, even so, Senora Barranechea, eskerrik asko!
Rating:
Summary: A Fine Book on Basque-Spanish Cuisine by a Rising Star Chef
Review: Marichu Restaurant in Manhattan as long been one of the city's best kept secrets. It has been open for four years and has still not been reviewed by either The New York Times or New York magazine. However, that has not kept some top gastronomic figures and chefs from discovering it, among them the editors of Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and Saveurmagazines and star chefs such as Park Avenue's David Burke, Windows on the World's Michael Lomonaco, Jean-Louis Palladin of Napa Restaurant in Las Vegas. Many other gourmets have been introduced to Barrenechea's food at prestigious James Beard Foundation events, in which she has been invited to cook on several occasions. Carlos Horno, the Director of Turespaña, Spain's Ministry of Tourism, has called Marichu, which is named for Barrenechea's mother and uses many family recipes from her kitchen, "the most authentic Spanish restaurant in the United States." Jean-Louis Palladin, himself one of the most highly ranked chefs in America, was so impressed by the authenticity of Barrenechea's Spanish Basque cuisine that, after dining at Marichu, he spent hours talking withthe chef and then invited her to Las Vegas to cook with him at Napa Restaurant during a gastronomic week that featured star chefs from around the country. After hours, Palladin had Barrenechea cook her Spanish and Basque specialties for the other chefs. Each time Barrenechea turned out a particularly appealing dish, Palladin would exclaim, "That one is for me." Barrenechea's first book, The Basque Table: Passionate Home Cooking from One of Europe's Great Regional Cuisines (Harvard Common Press), was published in October with advance orders for 10,000 copies. Publishers Weekly, the highly-respected periodical of the publishing industry, gave the book a coveted starred review and Barnes and Noble, America's most prestigious book stores, ordered a substantial number of copies. The book will also be featured by Book-of-the-Month Club's Good Cook division. On October 15, Spain's prestigious National Academy of Gastronomy went outside Spain to award the English-language The Basque Table their 1998 National Gastronomy Prize for Best New Publication. A few days later, Edouard Cointreau (of the famous Cointreau liqueur family), publisher of the International Cookbook Revue, announced that, out of several thousand cookery and food books entered from around the world in sixteen categories, The Basque Table had been awarded the prize for Best Regional Cuisine Book at the Fifth Annual Cookbook Fair Awards to be held in Périgueux, France in November. The Basque Table contains the recipes for many of the dishes you will find at Marichu, along with charming anecdotes and commentaries about the Spanish Basque country and its customs. The recipes, like some of the best food I have encounter in Barrenechea's homeland, are authentic renditions of deceptively simple dishes, which in the hands of Basque women chefs especially, are sublime evocations of all one could ask for in good European country cooking. In Barrenechea's native region are such culinary centers as the stunningly beautiful resort city of San Sebastián, which former New York Times restaurant critic Bryan Miller claimed was the best restaurant city per capita of any place outside New York. The tascas (tapas bars) in San Sebastián's old quarter, alone, constitute the densest concentration of bars in Europe, but the attraction here is the food as much as wine and beer. Then, there is a string of legendary restaurants in fishing villages and in towns hidden in the lush, green Basque mountains, which have inspired many a culinary pilgrimage. Barrenechea's home town of Bilbao was known for great seafood restaurants and asadores (restaurants featuring wood-grilled steak and fish) long before the Guggenheim Museum began to attract millions of visitors. I have eaten at the Manhattan restaurant (and the former Bronxville location) many times over the past several years and Barrenechea's cooking has made dining at Marichu one of my favorite culinary experiences in America. Many of her dishes are Basque and many are Spanish, but either way, they are the closest thing I have found to the real food of Spain in this country. In fact, some of her dishes, such as tortilla española (the potato omelet that is truly the Spanish national dish, not paella), gambas al ajillo (shrimp sizzled in hot olive oil with garlic), and salmorejo (a thick Cordoban-style gazpacho) are hard to top even in Spain. Other dishes such aspimientos de piquillo rellenos de bacalao (piquillo red peppers stuffed with brandade), rodaballo (pan-roasted turbot), and chipirones en su tinta (squid in an onion-flavored, squid ink- colored sauce) transport me back to The Basque Country itself. - - ©1998 Gerry Dawes, Restaurant Critic (The Journal News, Westchester, NY) Gannett Suburban Newspapers
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