Sartre and I visited the chic San Sebastian for a couple of
nights after our wedding with a focused agenda. To eat pintxos and go to
one of the three 3 Michelin star restaurants there.
San Sebastian is a sophisticated shrine to food on the Bay
of Biscay. It has the most Michelin stars per head or per square metre,
depending on the survey you’re reading.
The local obsession with good cooking and eating is as alive
today as it was when San Sebastian first emerged as a culinary hotspot.
Its pre-eminence as a foodie destination might be to do with
its local bounty. San Sebastian is enviably well-endowed when it comes to local
produce. From seafood and meats, to chocolate, cheeses and wines, most bases
can be covered within a stone’s throw from the town.
It might also have to do with when well-to-do Spanish and
French families first hit upon going to San Sebastian for their holidays. Chefs
followed the money, and soon the town was attracting top culinary talent.
On the Pinxto Hunting food tour run by San Sebastian Food,
our tour guide Lourdes offered a social reason behind the growth of pintxo bars
& restaurants. Because Spanish apartments tend to be on the small side,
Spanish people don’t invite friends to their homes for dinner parties. Instead,
they meet (and eat) on the street.
And in that spirit we ventured out into the balmy evening to
eat a curated selection of the best pintxos with accompany wines.
The vibrancy of the pintxos were matched only by the
vibrancy of our guide for the night, Lourdes from San Sebastian Food.
The value in this tour lies mostly in having the rules of
getting by at a pintxo bar spelt out to you. As Lourdes demonstrated, the worst
thing you can do is be polite. Instead, use chin and elbow to make your presence
felt at a crowded bar.
The process of pintxo freaks out a lot of tourists. The trick is not to be duped by a large plate, but instead take a small plate and eat
what you fancy. At the end, you pay for what you took, deduced by the bar owner’s
eagle-eye and corroborated by the detritus on your plate.
We ate everything from fabulous rare steak, to spicy sausage,
to fake baby eels. Apparently, painting strips of white fish with the markings
of elvers is big business here, tapping into local demand for a delicacy that
is hard to come by.
We ate the Basque Region’s answer to crème brulee. We were shown how to ‘break’ the effervescent
local wine Txakoli by pouring it from height. We learned how the Gilda pintxo
earned its name and more importantly, got to devour it – a near perfect skewer
of olives, guindilla peppers and anchovies.
We ate substantial pintxos, much more the size of a hearty
starter, of creamy fondant potatoes and mushrooms. We ate rosy pink duck,
alongside kebabs of prawns, monkfish and ham.
We stopped outside one of the city’s many gastronomic
societies, which have played a large part in the development of San Sebastian
society and foodiness. These are private clubs attended by men mostly (until
recently) where the club members take turns cooking dinner for each other. After
eating the costs are calculated, and members all chip in, according to a trust
system.
There’s a patriarchal flavor to these clubs and women are
still forbidden from some of the societies. Lourdes told us that her mother
never minded her father spending his nights at his gastronomic society, since
it meant he couldn’t be out womanizing.
In this way, these gastronomic societies are somewhere between
a British golf club and working men’s club. A social lifeline, a focus on food
and company, and a piece of living history.
We were certainly full and probably a little bit tipsy by
the end of the evening. And not a patatas bravas in sight. Which, in San
Sebastian, is the sign of a good night.