The youngest of five children, Iñaki Aizpitarte was born in Besançon to a Spanish family fleeing from the Franco dictatorship in Spain. After school, he held a string of odd jobs: stonemason, landscape painter, and, finally, oenology student. In 1999, he flew to Tel Aviv and worked as a dishwasher for a Serbian chef, where he learned the basics of cooking. Subsequently, he toured Latin America before arriving in Paris.
Aizpitarte worked his way through the French capital’s kitchens, first at Café des Délices then la Famille in Montmartre and Transversal in the Mac/Val museum, before opening le Chateaubriand in Belleville with his friend, Frédéric Peneau, in 2006.
It was an instant hit, declared le Fooding’s Best Restaurant in its first year. Within two years, le Chateaubriand had won the San Pellegrino Breakthrough Prize. Today, Aizpitarte is considered one of the symbols of the neo-bistrot movement, and le Chateaubriand was voted 9th best restaurant in the world in the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best list in 2011.
In his speech at MAD1, Aizpitarte cooks and talks with René Moss, one of the most renowned natural winemakers in the world.
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