Nagore Irazuegi

The Training Donostia is the first point in Irazuegi’s story, the place she comes from and the source that gives her cooking its family resemblance. In a lineage-minded kitchen, origin can be a form of training: a way of understanding the bite-sized precision of a pintxo, the social rhythm around a vermouth, and the way a cocktail can sit beside food without becoming an afterthought. In 2016, she founded the restaurant in Madrid. That act matters in the shape of her career because it joined authorship to service: not only cooking within a tradition, but giving that tradition a room, a menu, and a daily public life in the Spanish capital.

The Lineage The house Irazuegi built is explicitly tied to Basque gastronomy, and its inheritance shows through her specialty in pintxos, vermouths, and cocktails. Those three elements make a compact map of her work: food designed for immediacy, drinks built for appetite, and hospitality that moves through the bar as much as the dining room. Her most popular dish at the restaurant is Gilda Joxefa 2.0. Even in the name, there is a sense of relation across time: a familiar form carried forward, adjusted, sharpened, and made specific to the place where she serves it. The dish is part of a wider conversation around the gilda, a pintxo whose structure invites memory before invention. Another signature connected to her name, Gilda 2.0, appears at Bascoat in Madrid, Spain. It is a new twist on the pintxo, built with a plump anchovy, a puffed-up cracker, olive cream, piparra emulsion, and olive-oil pearls. The ingredients read like a small family tree of flavor: salt, crunch, fruit, pepper, and fat held in a single composed bite.

The Table At her Madrid restaurant, Irazuegi’s current role as chef gives the room its culinary center. The cooking is not presented as a break from where she comes from; it reads as a continuation, with Donostia behind it and Madrid in front of it. Pintxos are the clearest vehicle for that continuity. Their scale demands exactness, but their social purpose keeps them warm: they belong to conversation, appetite, and the passing of plates. Vermouths and cocktails extend that same idea, letting the bar carry part of the culinary story rather than sitting outside it. The Gilda Joxefa 2.0 shows why her work travels well across generations. It keeps the logic of a known bite while giving it a present-tense form, one that can be remembered by regulars and understood by newcomers. In that balance, Irazuegi’s table feels like lineage made edible: a Donostia-born sensibility given a Madrid home.

Signature

Nagore's signature dishes include Gilda Joxefa 2.0 and Gilda 2.0.