These are the dishes you can’t miss in Bilbao

Bilbao doesn’t try to convince you it’s a food city. It doesn’t need to. You figure it out around the third pintxo, or the moment a plate of bacalao al pil-pil arrives at the table still shivering in its clay dish, or somewhere between the second bar and the third during a Saturday txikiteo through the old town.

The food here isn’t performing for tourists. It’s just what people eat — and have eaten for a long time, with a level of care that makes most other cities look slightly embarrassed about their lunch.As there’s such a wide variety, we’re here to help you with some of the recommendations we give our customers at the end of the tour, but if you want to discover the best places… don’t hesitate to join us on a tour of Bilbao through its flavours.

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Gildas

A cocktail stick. A green olive. A salt-cured anchovy. A pickled guindilla pepper.

That’s it. And yet the gilda is the dish that starts every conversation about Basque food, because it was — literally — the first pintxo. Created in the 1940s at a San Sebastián bar and named after Rita Hayworth’s character in the 1946 film, because like her, the thing was considered green, salty, a little spicy.

Seven decades later, nothing about it has changed or needed to. The anchovy fat coats the olive, the pepper vinegar cuts through everything, and the whole thing disappears in one bite. Get one immediately upon arriving in Old Town, you won´t regrett.

Often, if you’ve never heard of gildas, they don’t sound very appealing, but believe me, I’ve seen hundreds of tourists try them for the first time, feeling a bit sceptical, but once you’ve tasted them, you can’t stop – their tangy yet vinegary flavour has something truly unique about it. And what’s more, the combinations are endless… And if you like them… you can make them yourself at home with ingredients you’ll find in the supermarket.

Bacalao al Pil-Pil

Salt cod has been central to Basque cooking since the 15th century, when Basque fishermen were working the Grand Banks off Newfoundland before most of Europe knew Newfoundland existed. They needed to preserve the catch for the journey home. Salt worked. The cod became foundational.

Pil-pil is what Bilbao did with it over the following five hundred years.

The ingredients are almost insultingly simple: salt cod, olive oil, garlic, guindilla. No cream. No flour. What makes the sauce is the gelatin in the fish skin — worked out slowly by moving the pan in small circles, drop by drop, until it emulsifies with the warm oil into something thick, pale gold, trembling slightly when you set the clay casserole down. The technique takes years to get right. When it’s right, there’s nothing else like it.

You’ll find mediocre pil-pil at tourist-facing restaurants. The good version is barely seasoned, barely decorated, and arrives smelling of garlic and deep sea. Bread is mandatory for the sauce.

A pil-pil where the oil has split — pooling around the fish instead of binding to it — means the cook rushed. You can tell before you taste it. A properly made sauce clings.

Pintxos

Explaining pintxos as “Basque tapas” is technically accurate and practically useless. It misses the point by about half a city.

The original pintxo was a slice of bread, something piled on top, held together by a toothpick. That format still exists — but today’s pintxos bars in Bilbao run closer to a very casual restaurant operating at high speed behind a narrow counter. Salt cod croquettes with a flowing centre. Foie gras on brioche with a Pedro Ximénez glaze. Mushroom tarts baked to order in an oven the size of a shoebox. Hot pintxos, made when you ask, from a menu chalked on the wall that most visitors never notice.

The system for eating them is called txikiteo: one drink, one or two pintxos, then move to the next bar. You don’t linger. Each bar has its thing. The point is to move through them.

Txikiteo through Casco Viejo with no particular plan is, genuinely, one of the better ways to spend a few hours in any European city. In our team we have selecte some of our favourites pintxos to try while visiting Bilbao , we recoomend to read it before order.

Marmitako

This one has an origin story you can believe: crews on Basque fishing boats, Bay of Biscay, somewhere in the summer months. Fresh bonito del norte — northern albacore tuna — potatoes, onion, green peppers, paprika. Everything in the one pot (marmita) that gave the dish its name. Cooked, eaten, done.

What makes marmitako worth ordering now, a century or two later, is that it hasn’t been refinement-ed into something else. It’s still a broth-based tuna and potato stew, still built on a sofrito, still the kind of thing that makes sense on a cool Bilbao afternoon. It’s working food that happens to be delicious.

The catch: bonito season runs June through September. A marmitako made with fresh bonito in August is categorically different from one made with frozen fish in February. Most restaurants are honest about which you’re getting — the menú del día boards that list it in summer are a reliable signal.

If you see it on a weekday lunch menu between June and September, that’s when to order it. It’s exactly the right dish for the format — a proper bowl of something, bread on the side, half a carafe of house wine, done by 2:30.

Bacalao a la Vizcaína

If pil-pil is the technical side of Basque cod cookery, vizcaína is the emotional side. It’s bolder, darker, and it carries the name of the province for a reason.

The sauce starts with choricero peppers — large, dried, sweet-smoky red peppers grown in the Basque Country and nowhere else that quite works the same way. They’re slow-cooked with onion and garlic until they dissolve into a thick, brick-red sauce that smells of something between paprika and stone fruit. The salt cod goes in, absorbs the sauce for a long time, and comes out looking completely different to the fish that went in: deep red, almost stained, the pepper flavour through every flake.

This dish spread from Bilbao across Spain and then to Cuba and Mexico, carried by emigrants who needed a taste of home. You’ll find versions of it across the Spanish-speaking world. None of them are quite this.

A vizcaína made with regular paprika tastes like a different dish. If the sauce isn’t brick-red and slightly thick, something went wrong.

Txangurro

Spider crab. The Basque coast has it in abundance, and Bilbao has been cooking it long enough to land on a preparation that’s hard to improve: pick the meat, mix it with leeks, tomato, onion, brandy, then pack it back into the shell and bake it until the top goes golden.

It arrives looking theatrical, which is slightly at odds with the fact that it tastes like the sea distilled into one shell. The brandy caramelises. The leek sweetens. The crab meat itself is mild and sweet, and the shell concentrates everything during the bake. You eat it with a small spoon and good bread and, if you know what you’re doing, a glass of txakoli.

Txangurro isn’t a traditional pintxo — it requires too much preparation and costs accordingly. You’ll find it at sit-down restaurants that do seafood seriously, and occasionally as a pintxo-sized version in better bars. If you see the full version on a menu and the price seems high, it’s probably because they’re using fresh crab and bothering to make it properly.

Tortilla de Patatas

You’ve probably eaten a Spanish omelette. It was probably fine, and it was probably nothing like what Bilbao does.

The local version is jugosa — juicy, soft-centred, the eggs barely cooked past the point of setting. The potatoes are slow-cooked in olive oil first, not sautéed quickly, so they’re yielding through and through rather than having any crunch or resistance. The whole thing should wobble slightly when you pick it up on a plate.

Getting a good tortilla right is harder than it looks. The temperature control is unforgiving. Txintxirri tavern has become something of a destination for theirs — people queue specifically for it. But an honest pintxos bar anywhere in Casco Viejo, if they take it seriously (and many do), will have a version worth eating.

It’s not just another item on the menu. Many people choose a tortilla skewer for lunch or as a mid-afternoon snack; it’s a source of great pride for restaurant owners that people regard their tortillas as a benchmark, and it’s undoubtedly a real honour for them to achieve this.

You’ll find a version worth eating in almost any good pintxos bar — ask for tortilla jugosa if you want it properly soft.

Kokotxas

Most visitors walk past the menu item without knowing what it is. This is a mistake.

Kokotxas (these are the gelatinous pieces of meat taken from the chin and throat of cod or hake; basically, they’re the chins of these fish) – we know that might not sound very appetising when put like that… but trust us, they have a unique taste and every bite is a real treat.

The flavour is intensely oceanic. There’s nothing subtle about kokotxas and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re usually served as a starter or a single pintxo, which makes them a low-commitment way to try something genuinely local that most of the people in the bar around you will have grown up eating.

When prepared al pil-pil, they become one of the finest things you can eat in the Basque Country: trembling, rich, deeply oceanic, unlike anything else.

They are also small, which means they appear most often as a pintxo or a starter rather than a main course. This makes them ideal for curious eaters who want to taste something genuinely local and genuinely exceptional.

You can try them at the most traditional spots in the Old Town; any place that features ‘kokotxas al pil-pil’ on a handwritten menu is worth a go – I don’t think it’ll go unnoticed.

Idiazabal with Membrillo

Bilbao is twenty minutes from the coast and forty from proper hill country. The cheese is where you taste the hills.

Idiazabal cheese is made from the raw milk of latxa sheep — a Basque breed that grazes on high pasture and produces milk with a particular richness. The cheese is pressed, lightly smoked over cherry wood, and aged anywhere from a couple of months to over a year. Young Idiazabal is mild and slightly acidic with a smooth paste. Aged Idiazabal gets sharper, nuttier, and darker, with the smoke becoming more pronounced.

The classic way to eat it: a wedge of the aged version with a spoonful of membrillo (quince paste) on the side. Salt and smoke against floral sweetness. It’s not complicated. It works better than almost anything.

You’ll encounter Idiazabal throughout a day of eating in Bilbao — as a pintxo topping, grated over dishes, served at the end of a meal. Try it on its own at least once to understand what you’re tasting everywhere else.

The Basque Cheesecake

In 1988, Santiago Rivera https://www.diariovasco.com/gastronomia/recetas/postres/receta-tarta-queso-20201105113026-nt.html made a cheesecake at La Viña in San Sebastián and left the top too dark, the centre too liquid. It looked wrong. It tasted right. He kept making it that way.

For years it was just what La Viña served. Then food people started noticing. Then food media. Then in 2021 the New York Times called it the flavour of the year, by which point you could find versions of it in Tokyo, Istanbul, Seoul, and probably your nearest high street. It became the most replicated dessert of the last decade.

What most of those versions share is the caramelised surface and the runny centre — the visual identity. What they miss, usually, is the restraint: no crust, no flavouring, no decoration. Just cream cheese, eggs, cream, a small amount of flour, high heat, and the judgment to take it out at the right moment. The interior, at room temperature, should be somewhere between mousse and custard — not solid, not liquid, something in between that disappears quickly.

It breaks every rule of dessert-making. The top is dark, almost scorched. The inside is barely set. It has no base, no crust, no decoration. It doesn’t need them.

We always recommend try it at room temperature, never cold. Straight from the fridge, the centre sets and the magic disappears. A good bar will know this.

Putting It Together

These dishes cover the range of what Bilbao does: old fishing-boat cooking, technically demanding preparations that take decades to master, humble bar snacks that turn out to be as good as anything at a formal restaurant, and a dessert that managed to go from one bar in the old part of San Sebastián to everywhere on earth in roughly thirty years.

The best way to eat through all of them is with someone who knows which bar is having a good week, where to go for the kokotxas right now, and when to skip the place that looked interesting from the outside. That’s what our food tour is — a local guide, a small group, and a morning or evening moving through the bars and kitchens of Casco Viejo in the way the city was always meant to be eaten.