S5, E1: Unpacked, Five Questions: Why Spain’s Star Chefs Are Setting Up Michelin-Starred Restaurants in Tiny Towns

Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story.

In this episode, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave sits down with contributing writer Lisa Abend, a Copenhagen‑based journalist known for her deep reporting on food, culture, and the ways travel shapes communities. For her latest Afar feature, Lisa embarked on an ambitious road trip across northern Spain to visit five tiny towns where some of the country’s most exciting chefs are opening destination restaurants — and, in the process, helping revive regions long affected by depopulation.

Lisa shares how she first discovered this movement, why these chefs are choosing villages of just a few hundred residents over major cities, and how their restaurants are sparking unexpected ripple effects — from new guesthouses to revived local food traditions. She also talks about the surprising absence of seafood in northern Spain’s inland kitchens, the emotional family histories behind many of these restaurants, and why chatting with gas‑station attendants might be the best road‑trip advice you’ll hear all year.

Transcript

Katherine LaGrave: Welcome to Unpacked: Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I’m Katherine LaGrave, executive editor at Afar. I’ve loved magazines since I was a kid, and not just the stories in the magazine, the stories about how those stories got made, too. Now, decades later, that’s the purpose of this whole podcast, speaking with writers and photographers who have an ear for incredible travel experiences about how their print stories came to life.

Lisa Abend is one of those people. An Afar contributing writer, Lisa is based in Copenhagen and has written about everything from what it’s actually like to buy a one euro home in Sicily to the ways climate change is transforming Greenland’s landscapes and language. For her newsletter, The Unplugged Traveler, she travels around Europe without using the internet. Lisa is also incredibly knowledgeable about food and lived in Spain once upon a time to report her 2011 book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentices. In it, she follows 35 chefs in the kitchen at El Bulli, at one point one of the most famous restaurants in the world.

For her latest Afar feature, Lisa returned to Spain to take an epic road trip around the northern half of the country. She visited five small towns where, over the past decade, Spanish chefs have opened ambitious restaurants—restaurants that are now considered the best in the country and even the world. Tough assignment, right?

I sat down with Lisa to learn more about what drew her to this story, why chefs are turning to tiny towns to open ambitious culinary projects, and yes, why you should take time to chat with gas station attendants in Spain.

Hi Lisa, so nice to be speaking with you again.

Lisa Abend: Yes, it’s very nice to be back.

Katherine: So your most recent story for us is about chefs who are helping revitalize tiny towns in Spain by moving there, in some cases returning to their homes there and opening these incredible restaurants, many of which have earned Michelin stars in recent years. And I’m curious, where did you first hear about the movement of some of these chefs, and when did you think, oh, this is a story?

Lisa: Well, I had actually, that year, which this was last year, I had been at a chefs conference in Madrid and was talking to the organizer, and he was telling me about some of these young chefs, and some of them were actually speaking at this event and listening to them, especially listening where they had come from, because they were working in some of the best restaurants in Spain, which means really some of the best restaurants in the world. And yet when it came time for each of them to open their own place, they were going back to these tiny, tiny villages that I had never heard of. And I used to live in Spain.

Katherine: And when did you start to think, oh, this is a story idea?

Lisa: At that conference, I went up and introduced myself to two of them, and just got a little bit of a hint of what it was like to have all of these ambitions and then have to confront the reality of the small town in which you are located, which probably doesn’t have, let’s say, elevated culinary context. And so I thought that, that question about that struggle of coming with all of this training and these ideas and creativity and talent and looking at the limitations of the place where you choose to base yourself, that seemed like an interesting tension.

But then I also—I used to live in Spain, and I knew that the problem of depopulation, what they refer to there as La España Vacía, or The Emptying Spain, was quite acute, and that you had huge swaths of the country that are basically being emptied, that they don’t have enough children there to keep schools open. They don’t have enough of a population to maintain a clinic or even a single doctor. And so I kind of put these two things together and started thinking, huh, I wonder if there’s also a story there, if a restaurant could actually help fight that depopulation.

Katherine: You bring me so beautifully and so naturally to my next question, because food and travel, oftentimes, especially in storytelling, are framed as separate things when in reality they’re so closely tied and really drive each other. In what ways did reporting this story really show you how one can support or inform the other?

Lisa: Yeah, that became very clear really from the start. As soon as I got to the first place, because what I quickly learned in this small town in Extremadura of 1,800 people is that they saw that restaurant as a special occasion place that the locals there would go there, maybe for a birthday or anniversary, or if they had guests coming from out of town and they wanted to show off what their town had. But that restaurant in particular, and this would be true for all of them, really depended on drawing travelers from other parts of Spain and even further abroad.

And by bringing those people, by using food as the lure, as it were, to draw people, they would bring with them revenue and greater opportunities. And in some cases, those opportunities would sort of radiate out from the restaurant first to their suppliers, their producers, and then to people who might want to open a bed-and-breakfast or start making certain kinds of crafts that might be appealing to visitors. None of the restaurants had been open for all of that long, so it was still early days, but they could definitely see a kind of ripple effect.

This was also something that really shocked me. I’ve been writing about Spanish cuisine for a long, long time, and one of the key things that I know about Spanish food is that they eat a lot of seafood there, fish and shellfish, and especially in the north, because they’ve got the Atlantic there with really phenomenally good shellfish. It had never occurred to me that you could even have a Spanish restaurant that didn’t serve at least a few courses of seafood. But in the north, none of those restaurants did. And this was so striking to me because at no point were we ever more than 100 kilometers from the sea—so 60 miles. And yet none of them served it because it wasn’t part of the local culture. There was a mountain range in between, or the town was too poor and nobody would bring it in. And so in each of these restaurants, the chefs were true to that. They were that devoted to the local cuisine.

Katherine: That is a funny surprise. Yes. Definitely. Yeah. I think there was the one that you mentioned where they would bring salted cod—like, dried. Was it the bacalao that they would bring?

Lisa: Bacalao once a year at Christmas, because that was Oncils, because it was way up in the Pyrenees and the village would be completely closed off for much of the year by snow. But for this, and who knows when the bacalao actually got there because, you know, it’s planks—you can—it’ll keep forever. But that was considered the Christmas dish. And so there was salt cod on the menu, but otherwise no seafood there either.

Katherine: Well, sounds like you were not wanting for amazing food.

Lisa: I was not.

Katherine: You mentioned living in Spain before. You’re certainly no stranger to fine dining. You’re the author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, a behind the scenes look at El Bulli. I love the title, by the way.

Lisa: Oh, thank you.

Katherine: How has fine dining in Spain changed since that book was published?

Lisa: Well, that was maybe the most exciting thing for me about this story, because I’ve felt that in some ways, there hadn’t really been anything new in the dining scene in gastronomy since Ferran Adrià, who is the chef of that restaurant, and the kind of wave of what you could call avant-garde cooking really took off in Spain. And that’s not to say that there haven’t been great new restaurants. There absolutely have been.

But something that was really new in terms of ideas—that I hadn’t really seen that much of. But what I found when I went to these restaurants is that each of these chefs had been trained in a lot of those very innovative techniques, but they were using them not just to show off new tricks or make foams or whatever you think of when you think about sort of high-end dining. They were using it to tell stories about a very, very well-defined and local culture. And so it felt like there was this whole other layer there that they were exploring. They weren’t just—I mean, we’re all very used to the idea of local cuisine, right? Of farm to table or showcasing local ingredients. And they were definitely doing that. But they were also looking to their history and their culture and trying to say something about that through what were very modern culinary techniques.

Katherine: I mean, there are so many wonderful examples of that in the story. I think of the breadsticks. They’re not breadsticks. It’s like dried intestine.

Lisa: Lamb intestine, yes.

Katherine: And also the dessert. The ash-forward dessert.

Lisa: Yes. Well, you know, that restaurant, Arrea!, under chef Edorta Lamo—that one was especially powerful, I thought. I had actually been to his previous restaurant, which was a tapas bar in San Sebastián. And what made that tapas bar so great, or pintxos bar, was that he was doing really innovative, modern, creative kinds of tapas or pintxos.

When he opened Arrea! in the town that his family came from, he had this huge repertoire of really advanced, innovative technique. But he applied it not just to, again, like the more sort of local cuisine. He wanted to tell a story because this had been such a poor region of Spain and still almost semi-feudal in some of its land ownership patterns. People went hungry much of the time, and the way that they fed themselves was through essentially stealing from landowners.

They would go up into the woods and they might illegally hunt. They could maybe go to the river and illegally fish on land that they did not have access to. They could forage for berries or mushrooms or lichen. There was a lot of lichen, acorns. And that’s what they survived on. And this was a cause of a lot of cultural shame, because they were eating foods that they felt were not dignified, and they were doing it just to survive. And so part of what Edorta was trying to do there was elevate that and show that it could be delicious and beautiful and worthy of the name “cuisine” itself.

Katherine: After the break, Lisa shares her advice for Spanish road tripping and which food from her trip she’d choose for dinner in a heartbeat.

I think this is an epic food story, and it’s also just a really epic road trip. I mean, you spent hours driving. A lot of that, of course, didn’t make it into the story because of space. But what advice do you have for road tripping in Spain?

Lisa: Well, give yourself a little more time than I had. I think that would be the first thing. I mean, one of the other things that I wanted to do with this story is to show just how diverse the different regions of Spain are. This drive was basically the top half of the country, and it was like a semicircle. But you’ll notice, like as soon as you cross from one region to another, it’s not just that the landscape changes, although it definitely does. You go from really flat and dry to cold and misty and mountainous, but so much else changes too. The architecture changes, the kinds of festivals, celebrations that happen—I was there for San Fermín when I was there. So I got to drop in on the running of the bulls in Pamplona. But sometimes the language changes and it’s really distinctive.

So especially, I think, for a first-time visitor to Spain, I would say give yourself time to really experience that difference there. In terms of other things, just, I don’t know, talk to people. I had so many wonderful exchanges. On that first day, leaving—well, after the first night in Extremadura—Extremadura is, among the products that it’s known for, I think this figures in the story, are cherries, a valley there that’s very famous for its cherries. So I bought a bunch of those and had a huge, they wouldn’t sell anything less than like a full kilo.

So I had a lot of cherries in the car and stopped at a gas station, and the attendant was a woman who came out, and I just offered her some cherries, and she was really grateful. She really liked them. And so when I went in to pay, I gave her some more, and she was so grateful that she said, oh, well, if you’re going to give me a gift, I have to give you a gift too. And so she went in the back and I was like, what? What? What is this going to be from a gas station? And with a lot of ceremony, she came out and presented me with this plate that had been wrapped. And I was like, I didn’t know what it was going to be. I was imagining some local craft or, you know, something that somebody’s grandmother had passed down, and got back in the car, opened it, and it had a bunch of Disney characters on it. And clearly the gas station had done some promotion like 30 years ago, and they just had it lying around. So that was the reciprocity. That was an extreme example. But people—they were just so friendly and so excited to share some aspect of their culture. Just or not—that was also a really special part of the trip.

Katherine: That’s a great story. And you got a plate to put your cherries on. That’s very helpful. I was thinking about our work together and remembering a story we did a few years ago about one euro homes in Sicily. And I feel like there’s something similar here, in this case, where the tiny towns are being supported in many ways by these chefs and the surrounding industries, and not by home buyers, of course. But what enchants you about these really small towns?

Lisa: Mm-hmm. I think what I’m moved by is it’s like a lens onto community, onto places where residents don’t just know each other, but depend on each other in a way that I think gets lost in bigger cities. And I think it’s also a place where you can—I mean, this kind of goes back to your previous question—but as a traveler, where you can feel like your impact isn’t negative. I write so much about overtourism, and there’s so many places in Europe that are suffering from that, but the parts in Europe that tend to really benefit from travelers coming through are those rural ones, where people—you know, where it’s quieter. There may not be a gazillion museums or hot clubs to go to, but there is a kind of beauty. There’s a chance to really talk to people and see how their community works, and there’s a chance to actually have a positive impact.

Katherine: I love that. There are so many beautiful moments of community, of food in the story, and I know that asking you to pick a favorite meal is unfair. So I’ll go smaller.

Lisa: Thank you!

Katherine: What is one thing from your trip that you’d like to eat right now, in this moment, and tell us why?

Lisa: Oh, that’s a great question. Um. Well.

Katherine: It’s what time where you are? I guess that’s maybe helpful.

Lisa: It’s dinner time. That’s very—yes. It’s perfect. OK, so one confession is that one of the reasons that I went through is Asturias, which is in the northwestern part of Spain. And I actually lived there off and on for a few years. And to this day, it remains my favorite part of Spain. It’s very unlike much of the country. It’s very green. It’s this very narrow strip that is bordered on one side by the sea and by mountains on the other, and so it’s very dramatic scenery. And there are a couple of very nice cities there, but it’s predominantly rural. And Asturias has a very distinctive culinary culture because it was so wet. It’s one of the two regions in Spain that actually produce cow’s milk, dairy, rather than sheep or goat, which is what you get in most of Spain. They drink cider there instead of wine. They have beautiful—have a tradition of farm-raised chickens that are delicious, and they also grow incredible beans. And the flavors there are very distinctive to me. So there were a couple of dishes at Monte, which was the restaurant in this teensy little village called San Feliz, that were that really sort of captured those same flavors, and one of them was super simple. It’s called a bolla preñada, which translates literally as a pregnant roll or pregnant bun. And it’s just like a bread roll that’s stuffed with like a soft chorizo. And it’s really smoky from the pimentón and kind of porky, and it’s just delicious. And at Monte, Xune made a very refined version of that that I would eat in a heartbeat.

Katherine: Sounds like a good dinner with some cider if you ask me.

Lisa: Exactly, exactly.

Katherine: In what ways is this also a family story?

Lisa: Mm-hmm. Well, that was something that I hadn’t expected but kept coming through again and again, in part just because oftentimes the chefs, when they opened the restaurants, they would work with family members. That was true at Versatil in Extremadura where Alejandro worked with his two brothers. All three had decided to open the restaurant together. Xune in San Feliz—when he opened that it was by himself, but his sister, who was working, I think, in a butcher shop in the neighboring town, soon joined, and she was actually learning to be a server in a high-end restaurant. She was still a little nervous about it, but she was doing great. And then probably the most beautiful example of that was in Ansils with Iris, who was a powerhouse of a chef, who had—for one thing, she had learned to cook from her grandmother. It was her grandmother who first opened an inn in this tiny village, and the grandmother and Iris cooked together there, each one in their own style: Iris’s more modern and grandmother more traditional. But she, Iris, was running that restaurant. Her grandmother was still there—lives next door, actually. But she was running the restaurant with her brother Bruno, and Bruno became the sommelier and sort of ran the front of the house. And it was just this lovely family enterprise.

So really, all of them, there was a family connection. But what I also found was that they were looking back to their family’s history and past. I mean, Edorta had chosen this place because his family had been in this town, which, I have to tell you, is not like the most beautiful town in the world. But it was where he wanted to be because his family had been there literally since the 1400s.

And then probably the most amazing thing that happened on that trip was at the first restaurant, as we were leaving, Alejandro, the chef, insisted that I go to this other town, and that turned out to be completely abandoned. It was sort of a ghost village, and that town was called Granadilla. And the next day at Monte, there was a dessert on the menu that was also called Granadilla, and it turned out that that chef’s parents—Xune’s parents, or his father, excuse me, had been born in the same town, in Granadilla, and had left it when people were evicted to move north and get a job up in the north. So there were all of these sort of mysterious family connections that came out in the course of the reporting.

Katherine: Yeah, it’s really fun to follow as a reader, and it was a real joy to work on it with you. Thank you so much for chatting, and I’m sure we’ll speak again soon.

Lisa: I’m sure we will. Thank you.

Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Lisa’s story and to her social media handles.

Join me in two weeks for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award-winning features, writers, and photographers. I’ll be speaking with Paris-based photographer Natalie Mohadjer, whose recent photo essay on Siwa, Egypt, has me dreaming of warm weather and sand dunes.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit Afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LaGrave. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit Airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to its other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.