Visiting San Sebastián last month, I was reminded of the joys and hazards of grazing. The speciality in this chic city, and throughout Spain’s northern Basque region, are pintxos – miniature open sandwiches topped with everything from chorizo and padrón peppers to anchovies and baby eels. Pintxoing, as I’ll call it, becomes almost like a game in San Sebastián’s labyrinthine Old Town, in which the regional delicacies are colourfully displayed in bar-top glass cabinets. The goal is to eat enough pintxos to keep hunger at bay, but not so many that you don’t have room for one more. You’re never starving, but the flipside is that you’re never entirely satisfied, either.
About ten minutes passed before I finally caught the eye of a barman, glaring intently at me from inside his castle of pintxos
It’s easy to assume that grazing will always be cheaper than a sit-down meal – and in some cities in Andalucía, especially the tapas capital of Granada, that is true. But that principle doesn’t quite hold in San Sebastián, Spain’s third most expensive city. Widely regarded as the country’s top culinary destination, it ranks third in the world for Michelin stars per capita (after Luxembourg and Kyoto). Prices average about €15 for two beers or glasses of wine and two pintxos, which quickly mounts up – especially as you need quite a few of them to feel full.
Bar Sport has been one of my favourites ever since I first wandered in 2017: it has great service, reasonable prices and good food. I also love Gorriti Taberna, which has several of the characteristics by which you can always identify a proper local hangouts: a retro Coca-Cola sign on which the bar’s name appears in white letters, a till that looks like it’s been poached from a museum and a floor covered with used napkins. Also popular with locals is noisy Danena Taberna, which serves what must be San Sebastián’s cheapest glass of wine (€1.50) and is famous for its huge squid sandwiches (bocadillos de calamares). It also has one of the Old Town’s few outdoor terraces.
The pintxo order form sounds like (and perhaps is in some places) an easy and helpful system, especially if you don’t speak Spanish: each pintxo is described and numbered in the display cabinets, so you simply tick how many of which you want on the form and hand it in. But in the bars I visited that have converted to the form, there wasn’t much evidence of streamlining.
Take, for example, another of my favourites, Bar Casa Alcalde, which was, the last time I visited in 2018, a form-free zone. The choice in this place is overwhelming – a fortress of pintxos that looks like it could keep a tank out. After perusing the cabinets, my friend and I submitted our requests and went to stand at a little round table. About ten minutes passed before I finally caught the eye of a barman, glaring intently at me from inside his castle of pintxos. He impatiently pointed to our drinks and snacks on the bar, as if they’d been there, awaiting collection, for hours. I went up, resisting the very British urge to apologise for not having acted as my own waiter, and he took my payment without a word or smile.
In another establishment, I started ordering drinks at the bar, only to be told that they, too, could be acquired via the form. But we’d already submitted those, so I ended up using the old-fashioned face-to-face method anyway. Several other tourists were also hanging around, meekly waving their forms at passing waiters as if in surrender. Our pintxos (a crab bisque and giant pork scratching) were eventually brought to our table, but not at the same time and without cutlery. Procuring a spoon – as the bisque steadily cooled – was a long, drawn-out ordeal.
We rounded off two days of pintxoing in the tiny Bar Txepetxa, which specialises in anchovy toppings and has so far also resisted the form. It was here that I finally reached my grazing limit. Almost gagging on foie gras and anchovies, my stomach shrunk to half its normal size. I had to admit defeat for this year: another stuffed but happy victim of San Sebastián’s version of the hunger games.
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