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.