Food & Hospitality | Food & Drink Where barbecue culture began? (Image credit: Font83/Getty Images) Basque cuisine is an exploration of just how far wood, smoke and flame can be taken as a cooking technique when it’s expertly harnessed and applied to the finest ingredients. A Asador Etxebarri is almost too perfect. Even to those who have dined there, the restaurant occupies something of a mythical place in the mind’s eye. Was it real? Does it actually exist? The setting seems improbably flawless: Axpe, a tiny Basque village surrounded by green pastures and rugged, mist-shrouded mountains. The restaurant in an old stone farmhouse by a church where bells peal, tendrils of smoke…