Last day in the Basque region

Today, we went to one of the biggest indoor food markets in Europe. It's located by the Ribera metro station. Inside it's all about produce, meat and seafood. It's a two-story building and it looked like it used to be a part of train station mall.

                                                                 This sign was at the entrance.

                                                                 Nice building isn't it?

                                                           Amazingly fresh seafood.

Every time I go to markets like this, I really want to buy stuff and cook it myself. But there was no kitchen in the hotel. Plus, I'd rather try a bunch of different dishes at restaurants for such a short stay.



Anyway, we went to our first pintxos bar of the day, called Gure Toki. The very friendly server was helping us with broken Spanglish (Spanish 90% English 10%). And I tried to understand him with my Engnish (English 90% and Spanish 10%). I don't think we understood each other well but I decided to take some of his recommendations. These were all made to order hot pintxos.

First, fried soft shell crab with red pepper sauce (a bit spicy but not like Mexican spicy salsa). Very good.

This is a dish recommended by the server, called "kokotxa". In fact, we saw kokotxa at the market that we went to earlier. We realized that the name is the same as the restaurant that we went to in San Sebastian. Because we found this at the fish market, we knew this is some sort of seafood. It was small fish-like pieces but didn't look filleted. So, I thought it's some organ or roe. We still didn't know what kokotxa was at this point (later I Googled and found that it's hake (fish) cheeks. Usually cheek meat has some texture but this was really soft).

                               Breaded pulled beef cheek meat. Very pretty presentation.

Foie gras. Amazing presentation. Well executed. But the foie gras was more like "liver" with irony flavor. I guess a bit lower grads. It was only 3.50 Euro....

                                             Scallop. Unfortunately, it was a bit too salty...


After some sightseeing and rest at the hotel, we decided to do the same thing as yesterday; visit a few pintxos bars for appetizers then go to a restaurant.

                                        At the first bar of the evening, we had mushrooms and fried fish with peppers.


The second bar of the evening was Café Iruna

                      The one on the left is smoked salmon and the one on the right is sardine with (probably)red bell pepper paste.


It's around 8:00 on Friday. Some streets with a bunch of pintxos bars are very crowded like this.

The entrée for the evening was paella. Paella is not a traditional food in the Basque region but rather in the southeast, like Valencia. But we thought Bilbao may offer a nice seafood paella. We arrived at the restaurant around 8:30pm and nobody was there. But I knew it was just a bit too early.

This is again hake cheek. At this point, we didn't know it was kokotxa. So, we had kokotxa twice today. It was very good!

This is a seafood paella for two. Very nicely seasoned. But it didn't have the distinctive saffron flavors. Maybe that's the Basque style?

That's the end of the meals in the Basque region because we are flying to Marrakesh, Morocco tomorrow. One thing I noticed in the Basque region is the salt level. Compared to the dishes we've had in Italy and France, it seems almost all the dishes had a tiny bit more salt (acceptable saltiness, though).

Anyway, it's worth making a trip to the Basque region for the pintxos alone.