San Sebastian/Donostia – Part 2

We kicked off our first full day in San Sebastian/Donostia with a walk along the beaches that stretch quite a long way from where we’re staying, to the old town.

This walk, however, wasn’t one for exercise. This is the beginning of 2 solid days of Pintxo crawling. As mentioned previously, Pintxos is like a Tapas, but from the Basque region.

Bars in San Sebastian/Donostia often have their counters filled with plates of Pintxos as per the photo we took below.

Pintxos and Tapas are pretty much the same thing, however many Pintxos are served on a slice of bread/baguette. You don’t have to eat the bread, but sometimes it does add to the dish.

Some Pintxos don’t have bread at all, however, these are often special order dishes that aren’t sitting on the bar waiting to be snapped up by the passing masses.

We had a few pintxos bars pinned to visit and we also strolled into some random ones as well. The general rule is to have a drink and one pintxos at each establishment. We didn’t aways stick to this rule and sometimes had 2 pintxos.

Below is a collection of Pintxos snapped over the couple of days.

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The above images cover Pintxos from both days and of worthy mention was the Cheesecake from La Viña. This cheesecake is to die for and La Viña was the only place we visited twice. It was actually 3 times but more on that later.

On the morning of the second day, Kath and I went for a walk down to some of the art exhibits at the end of the rock wall. These are rusty looking sculptures of a rather odd shape but appear in many post cards etc.

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I also managed to take some drone footage, however even though we were up early, there was a lot of people around and I don’t really like to drone around people if it can be helped.

We then got stuck into our second day of Pintxos, which was largely like the first but with a completely different set of bars visited.

Dinner each night was a slightly different affair. After the experience with the Cider House we decided to play it safe the second night and so we walked to a local restaurant called Kukuarri.

Quite an upmarket looking restaurant which is part of a nice hotel. I ordered the Filet-mignon of Iberian Pork and Kath had the Lumagorri Chicken, both were excellent. Leo had the fish soup which was a little salty.

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The walk back to the hotel revealed a nice opportunity for a photo of our hotel, La Galleria. 

Dinner on our last night called for another trip into the old town and Pintxos alley, however the goal for this night was to experience a restaurant.

We ended up at a place that we tried to visit during the day but was closed. It was called Zeroku and while the menu was very interesting to look at, the value for money just wasn’t really there for me. The food was nice, but it wasn’t what we were after.

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We had just one small bite here and moved on down the alleys checking out more of the locations that were on our list. Sadly, most were completely booked out even though we were out and about well before the normal eating hour.

Somehow we ended up in front of La Niña and while our only real interaction with this place was the cheesecake, they also had a restaurant out the back. We asked if they had a table for 4 and hey presto! We were in luck.

Dinner consisted of a T-bone steak, cooked “medium”, which was essentially “rare” in our book. I would hate to see rare for these chefs. We ordered this with some mushrooms and as with most things in Spain, the dish came with potato chips.

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The steak was pretty nice though, so as much as it was turning Leo’s stomach a little to watch us eat it, we ate the whole thing.

The only downside of the dinner was that I was sitting next to where they stored the overflow cheesecakes and since we’d indulged already today I told myself I wasn’t allowed to have another serving on the same day!

Besides this, one of the staff kept joking with me that he was keeping his eye on me so I couldn’t sneak one off the shelf!

Tomorrow we’re off to Bilbao Airport to board our flight to Seville in the south of Spain before picking up our hire car and heading into Portugal.

Adios!