a guide to san sebastian's pintxos bars
“For food and travel writer Kate Gibbs, it’s all about scoring prime position at each of the many buzzing pintxos bars she visits as she tours the Basque seaside town famous for its out-of-this-world food culture.”
When you can’t move for all the paper napkins thrown on the floor, you’re in the right place.
In the Basque region’s San Sebastián, it’s a sign you’ve stumbled on a truly great pintxos bar. Follow the debris to a counter heaving with small rolls filled with jamon and harpooned with a toothpick, green olives draped with anchovies, and squares of tuna topped with whipped potato, throw your napkin at your feet, then move on to the next place. This is bar-hopping of the culinary kind, and there’s nowhere better in the world to do it.
Basque bar snacks, a refined and often two-bite version of Spain’s tapas, are reason enough for a clued-in epicurean to travel halfway across the world to San Sebastián, or Donostia as it is called in Basque, about an hour’s drive east of Bilbao. It’s a city that any self-respecting gourmand has on their bucket list, particularly if following a well-trodden hit list spanning Michelin-starred restaurants – think Mugaritz and Arzak – in the surrounding region and hole-in-the-wall pintxos bars. “
Don’t come here,” Anthony Bourdain joked with his viewers in Parts Unknown. “It’s going to be a problem, because you’re going to have millions and millions of tourists coming here to eat – every year, more.”
Read the rest of my travel story and epicurean adventures in San Sebastian, a story published in delicious. magazine, here.