Food Tours · Tour

Build Your Own Gilda in Gros, End With an 1886 Pantxineta

This one starts on the wrong side of the river, deliberately. Gros is the surf neighbourhood across the Urumea, where the Zurriola beach is and where people who live here actually eat, and almost no food tour goes there. You meet in the Plaza de Cataluña in front of the church of San Ignacio. Six tastings and four pours across five family-run bars and bakeries, ten guests at most. The first is grilled mushrooms with foie gras and alioli on toasted bread, paired with a Marianito, the Basque vermouth aperitif, herbal and faintly sweet. Then a couple's wine and beer shop where you build your own gilda: olive, anchovy and pickled pepper on a stick, the skewer that started the whole tradition here in the 1940s. Walking down between the Hotel María Cristina and the Victoria Eugenia theatre you get the Belle Époque half of the city, with the Kursaal and the Zurriola bridge in view and surfers heading out. In the Old Town you sit down for two skewers: shark and prawn out of the Cantabrian, and thick aged txuleta beef grilled over charcoal, which is the Basque country's other great obsession. The cider is poured txotx-style, straight from the barrel in a thin stream against the side of the glass. La Bretxa square is named for the breach blown in the city walls during the 1813 siege, and is now where people buy their fish. On 31 de Agosto there is a bar Bernardo has run for most of his seventy years, and an off-menu grilled squid with potatoes with a glass of txakoli. The last stop is the oldest pastry shop in the city, open since 1886, for a pantxineta made to the original recipe: puff pastry, thick pastry cream, toasted almonds on top. You take it away and eat it on the boulevard. Wheelchair accessible. Minimum two guests. Children under four join free without food. English-speaking guide. Stops vary by day and season. Dietary requirements can often be handled with notice; severe allergies cannot.