On The Road San Sebastian

Sparkling white wine poured from a height, mounds of gooseneck barnacles and melt-in-the-mouth suckling pig with quince sauce – Spain’s coastal corner surely wins the prize for the world’s best bar crawl…

- Lucy Gillmore

My guide Lourdes Erquicia laughed out loud at my horrified response when she told me to chuck my napkin on the floor. “It’s not easy persuading tourists to throw their dirty napkins on the ground – but it’s how we judge a bar. A bar full of napkins is a good bar.” 

I’m in northern Spain on a pintxos – also called txikiteo in Basque country – crawl with Mimo San Sebastián (sansebastianfood.com). We’re weaving through the crowded warren of alleyways in the Parte Vieja or Old Town. I’ve realised there’s no delicate way to eat pintxos, traditionally a slice of baguette teetering with food and speared with a wooden toothpick or pintxo – hence the name. The juices soak into the bread, run down your chin, coat your fingers and are smeared onto paper napkins, which are tossed on the floor. Pintxos were born, Lourdes tells me, because “it’s not our custom to entertain at home. We meet friends for a drink and snack before dinner”. It’s one of the reasons that, originally, there were no sweet pintxos – these were pre-dinner snacks, not the main meal. You also went to one or two places not the string of bars we were working our way through.