Foodie Scientist: Moving to Bilbao

Bilbao is the capitol of the Basque region. It's not a touristy city but more industrial. There is nothing famous besides the Guggenheim Museum but I'd heard they have good pintxos bars.

We left San Sebastian in the morning by bus. Luckily the bus terminal was right by the hotel we were staying at. It took us a bit over one hour and we arrived at Bilbao. Compared to San Sebastian, there were lots of people (and of course less tourists). This was a good sign. Maybe we could find even more local foods here.

After checking into our hotel in Bilbao, we went to a bar called La Viña del Ensanche. Here we decided to go for hot pintxos (made to order).

We just love octopus....

Beef cheek on creamy sauce, yummy!

After the first pintxos in Bilbao, we went to the tourist center to see whether they had any food related tours. As I mentioned above, this is not a touristy city so there wasn't anything I was interested in. So, we went back to the hotel and got some rest. Then, we went for pre-dinner pintxos. First, a bar that specialized in cheese pintxos. The front one is just a sardine. The left one in the back was some sort of Spanish soft cheese. The right one in the back said "parmesan". It tasted like parmesan but much drier. I think it was just parmesan-style.

Then, we went to El Grovo.

Some onion and mayonnaise mixture, lightly marinated sardine and caviar. Very good.

Brie-like cheese, olive oil marinated sun dried tomato, and anchovy. Kind of Italian-ish.

We had some nice appetizers. So, we were ready for the main dish. Tonight, it's a seafood restaurant. Since we arrived in the Basque region, we saw so many fish markets with tons of fresh seafood. We needed to try a seafood restaurant!

By the entrance, there was a bar. So, you could just have just a drink and pintxos there. But we kept going inside for the seafood meal. We were greeted by a gentleman who looked like the owner. He reminded us of an Italian restaurant owner of Sicily or something. Kind of grumpy looking but very friendly. In fact, he was speaking fluent Italian (at least we thought so) to Italian customers, so he may be Italian. But Italian and Spanish are such close languages...

This was a simple anchovy appetizer

This was something special to me. Three kinds of shell fish from the local sea : razor clam, cockle, and scallop. I had my first razor clam in Barcelona. I've had lots of different kinds of shellfish but hadn't had razor clam before. It was an eye-opening moment. This razor clam was as good was the one I had in Barcelona. Perfectly cooked with garlic and oil. Another special shellfish is the cockle. When I was at a culinary school, we had a school project and I made a menu based on the concept that the class decided. The concept was a gastropub in London. I did some research online and found there is a local clam called the cockle. Without knowing how it tastes, I made a menu with cockles. Now, I could actually taste it!! The result was... Well.. I'm used to shellfish with a strong ocean taste. But this was pretty strong. I don't know if this particular cockle had stronger flavors because the flavor of shellfish depends completely on the water where the shellfish is growing. It was a little too much for me. But now, I can say I've had cockles!!

This was another amazing dish. But I'm talking about the black thing on the left hand side. I know it's not clear but this was squid cooked in its own ink. SO GOOD!!!! This is definitely the best dish I've had since we arrived in Spain. The server (or owner) said this is traditional dish in the Basque region. I'm sure the sauce has lots of stuff inside but I couldn't tell because it was totally black. The fried fish on the right is hake, a local fish. It was good too. But it was under the shadow of the black thing.....