Bilbao and the Basque Country Restaurants

Bilbao and the Basque Country Restaurant Reviews

Basque cuisine, Spain's most prestigious regional gastronomy, derives from the refined French sensibility about cooking combined with a rough-and-tumble passion for the camaraderie of the table and for perfectly prepared seafood, meat, and vegetables.

An ancestral passion for food combined with fine raw ingredients from the Atlantic and the verdant pre-Pyrenean hills has made Basque cuisine famous. The so-called nueva cocina vasca (new Basque cooking) is now about 30 years old, but it was originally inspired by the nouvelle cuisine of neighboring France, and meant the invention of streamlined versions of classic Basque dishes such as marmitako (tuna and potato stew).

Though experts have often defined Basque cooking as simply "the art of preparing fish," there is no dearth of lamb, beef, goat, or pork in the Basque diet or on menus. Cooking both beef and fish over coals is a popular favorite as are—new Basque cooking notwithstanding—bracing stews combining legumes such as lentils and garbanzos with sausage.

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