Close to the famous coasts in south France and east Spain, The Basque country is less popular for tourists outside Europe. On the contrary, if u like to experience a culture shock and a taste buds shock in a short time, with the sunshine from the Pacific Ocean, the vitality of the Pyrenees, enjoy the magnificence of the mountain and the passion of the sea at the same time, The Basque country will be the best surprising choice for you.
This article will show how culture integrates and differentiates in this area through tables, the language, the food, the ingredients…we will also introduce some amazing restaurants we tried.
The location of The Basque country already shows something that we will see on table…
It comprises three parts: the Autonomous Communities of the Basque Country and Navarre in Spain and the Northern Basque Country in France.
Here is a map we found in a restaurant in Nothern Basque Country, what to eat in different areas are so east to tell.
1.Menu
Language can always be the first signal that your brain received here. In big city like Saint Sébastien with more tourist is easier to find English menu, here you can find most of the menus in city center are written in Spanish, Basque and English, a few also shows in French. If you know at least one foreign language, you can always find a way out here. Restaurant chefs and waiters often use Basque to communicate, but when you ask them questions in English, they can also explain in English well. I remember that when ordering food at a Spanish seafood restaurant, we were confused about the name of the seafood. A fluent French waiter immediately came up to serve us. This restaurant is located in the center of San Sebastian. You can choose a seat near kitchen watching people cooking, the steaming seafood and the brightly colored Sangria on the waiter’s plate immediately brought the vitality of this place to our eyes.
Later we go to a pretty camping place located in Zarautz which is around 30 minutes’ drive to Saint Sébastien. Menus there are written in Basque, some even don’t have a Spanish version. Traveling in a language environment that you don’t understand at all can bring great freshness, but it also brings a little nervousness to order, cuz you should know, even The Basques geographically surrounded by Romance languages, it is one of the only language isolates of Europe, with no syntactic parallels to English, even we know English, French, and a little Spanish, we still understand nothing on the menu, especially for people knows quite little about seafood names… for many times we need to take out our phones to see the pictures of dishes in Google Map for ordering. Even with so many unknowns, we still got our best camping experience the best restaurant during our travel.
2. Cusine method
2.1 Plancha
As we all know, one of the most common ways of cooking in coastal areas is “plancha”. 
These two little plates are cooked in a typical plancha way, season the seafood with salt and cook with olive oil, maybe will add a little more chili powder or something else, they are good as amuse-bouche, it is mainly the taste of the food itself, a bit chewy which is very suitable as the starter of starters without heavy taste.
📍Telesforo
We ate this “Plancha Turbo” in Zarautz, it was the first night we arrived, we are so desired to have a big meal with local food, but in that city, they have more tapas restaurants than dinner restaurants. Without reservation to a restaurant we wanted, we find this with fewer people. Even From the picture, you can smell the aroma of garlic oil. Garlic oil is one of my favorite oil in cooking, in this plancha dish, the garlic is perfect golden in oil, and the garlic oil wraps the fish skin and penetrates into the tender fish, with potatoes on the bottom, a little crispy outside, warm and soft inside…it is delicious.
I like the above plancha plats, but to be honest, they didn’t surprise me that much, for me they are kinda “straight food”, which means when you see it, you know what taste it will have. A surprise happened to me in Biarritz, we ate plancha as a starter again, I didn’t expect too much, but this plancha is sooo good. In fact, every dish in this restaurant has been carefully crafted with great care, and it is also our top three on the “Tasty Restaurant List” all the way!
📍Auberge 22
The calamari in the upper left corner is very tasty. It is no longer an easily cooked squid with only the outside taste. I guess this squid must be stewed in the soup for some time to have such a deep taste.
Fished are also very delicious, you can taste nothing except fresh and it is invincible with the sauce.
The salad is naturally very good, the chef is a person who knows how to match the taste, but my favorite is this shrimp. Normally, I want to eat shrimp for its fresh and I don’t want to overcook it. This shrimp is very fresh. There is no fishy smell, it looks simply like it has not been cooked, but it tastes like it has been done an operation carefully with invisible cuts to have such a good taste. Your tongue is slightly bounced by this good quality shrimp, and the deliciousness of the shrimp is 200% zoom in. We agreed that this is the best shrimp we have ever eaten on our trip.
After this meal, I have a deeper feeling of “delicious”. A good chef handles the ingredients in a special way, so even ordinary ingredients can surprise you. The best food is that has given you so many surprises but you can hardly tell what makes it so special, how similar the magic of food is to love.
2.2 Tapas
We can never avoid tapas when we talked about Spain or anywhere close to Spain. For me, good tapas is composed of good bread, good quality ingredients, and a good combination of different tastes.
Here are some good tapas we ate in Saint-Sebastien:
📍Bar Ganbara
This bar has many tapas with good bread, it’s bread is better than a lot of tapas restaurants. It also has good quality jambon and fish which you can directly see from photos. We also like its tapas which made of mushroom and foie gras, very tasty.
The manager there recommended us to try something that only can eat there. It looks very scary like animal’s feet, actually, it’s named “gooseneck barnacle”. The way to eat it is to pull its “nails” out and suck the meat and juice inside. It is indeed delicious as a kind of seafood, as well as this kind of food is very scarce and dangerous to pick, so the price is a bit expensive, about 20 euros per plate.
I also recommend those tapas restaurants in the center of Saint-Sebastien:
📍Sport bars
📍Gandarias
📍Bar Nestor
📍La Viña ( The best cheesecake)
2.3 Main course style
In the 1970s and 1980s Basque chefs were influenced by the nouvelle cuisine of France and created the nouvelle cuisine basque (wiki), not surprisingly, we ate some very good fusion dishes with basque style and french style. Here we highly recommend this basque restaurant “Kirkilla” in Zarautz which could probably get Michelin stars with so reasonable price. You can take a 18.9 euro menu with delicate dishes, for enjoying more, we take “menu degustation” for 45 euro person including a full bottle wine.
starter: “Tuna tartare, gazpacho with exotic fruits, and goat cheese ice cream”
Tropical fruit sauce is one of their specialty. Fresh and rich tropical fruit is paired with colder tuna, couple with creamy goat cheese, this is definitely a surprising starter with nothing to say about. The refreshing icy blue plate and the bright colors of food, just like the taste of this dish, tongue surfs in the summer.
“Pil-pil cod cheeks, fried garlic and chili mayonnaise, fried skins and oyster leaf”
With a dessert or a cocktail surface but actually a stewed fish dish, the savory sauce is very refreshing, on the top is the crispy fish skin, stewed fish in the bottom is perfectly fused with the sauce, the first bite it melts in the mouth, this dish looks like a real well-structured cocktail with heavy cream, virtually tastes very refreshing.
“Artichoke in green sauce, crayfish and their fried leaves”
“Tail Ravioli with its juice, potato emulsion and sprouts”
Zarzuela is one of the must-eat food for the seafood lover, especially in such a delicious area.
Different fishes, crustaceans, and shellfish stew are cooked in a fragrant broth, all those fresh seafood taste like just taken from sea with a clever sauce. Even in a seaside city, this is not a dish that can be found at will, so ran into it when you find it!
After we arrived Northern Basque Country in France, we tried more meat than seafood, like basque-style chicken. The skin of the chicken is very crispy, sprinkled with a lot of spices, and served with a sauce composed of tomatoes and peppers.
Here we also ate a different kind of Nam, which filling with confit duck leg, a famous dish from South France. This is the first time I have eaten Nam with duck, a bite with crunchy skin and oily meat can maximize your guilty pleasure.
2.4 Alcohol
Alcohol is another difference in the menu, when we were in The Basque Country in Spain, a bottle of alcohol always offered for free with menu, no matter it is a 20 euro menu or a 40 euro menu. If you travel there found a strange bottle of alcohol on your table, don’t worry, it is just a surprise for travel.
Sangria
We ate seafood most of the time, then we drank Sangria most of the time, different restaurants have different tastes of Sangria, but in all, they all not bad.
Cider
We tried cider twice in The Basque country, to be honest, we were a little disappointed.
2.5 Dessert
Desserts in the menu in The Basque Country in Spain with kind of reserved, they didn’t bring too many surprises, they are usually common desserts with common taste in dessert shop, you can taste good ones if you are lucky, but the local desserts are still relatively ordinary.
The only thing out of our exception is this Basque cake in Saint Sébastien, it is my favorite cheesecake ever, we ate this for two days. In the bar La Viña, this cake with an appearance of coking, but there is a little flow inside, which is different from the recipes on the internet.
📍La Viña
I have to emphasize that the desserts of The Basque Country in France are very large.
Here is a traditional Basque cake for one person, easy to see how big it is.
Here is another dessert we ate in Biarritz, also for one person.
📍Auberge 22
This restaurant not only gives me the best shrimp taste but also gives me the best cream taste ever. Their cream is another level of cream which have chance to be everyone’s best in their life.
I admire the wisdom of the Basque people in cooking, they know so much how to cook. As a foodie, I saw how the people here cook carefully and how to use the ingredients. Growing up in the inland, I never thought that seafood can be cooked so diversely. Its special geographical location, abundant ingredients, and refined cooking skills form this gourmet kingdom.
On this road, we drove the car, took the portable projector we received before departure, circled the Pyrenees, played movies next to the mountainside waterfall in the evening, and drove along the seaside towns. Eating ice cream in the downtown area, drinking sangria and seafood by the beach, camping on the hillside, sleeping on the beach under the hillside for an entire afternoon, gesticulate to people talks different languages…this is the summer romance portrayed by countless movies, it’s achieved in The Basque Country.
