Pinxtos at Asador Bastian

Basque Food in America Is Having a Moment, Just Not Where You Think

8 Minute read

27 Apr 2026

Joel Stein

Writer

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From San Sebastián to Santa Barbara, Basque cuisine is finding new ground in America, with its most interesting expressions often in the least expected places.

People often ask which region I’ve traveled to has the most interesting food. This almost always happens after I say, “Want to know which region I’ve traveled to has the most interesting food?” To those curious folks, I say: the Basque Country.

Situated in the north of Spain and stretching into coastal France, the Basque people speak their own language, which is based on the ancient game of seeing how you can fit the most t’s, x’s, and k’s into a word. Almost as complex as the language are the many types of Basque cuisine. And you can try them all here in America, if you travel to places that suck. But you can have the best version in a really nice place: Santa Barbara.

Dom Crisp, which is the actual name of a guy who loves to grill, made food I loved when he was at L&E Oyster Bar in Los Angeles. After visiting the Basque region in 2019, he became a full-on Basque chef, opening Dom’s Taverna in 2025.

This can happen to a person. There are more MICHELIN-starred restaurants per capita in San Sebastián than anywhere else, and numbers 2, 24, 85, and 87 on the poorly named “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” are in the Basque Country.

Crisp says his restaurant is “knocking on the door” of the number two restaurant on that list, Asador Etxebarri. I ate there nine years ago and visited the tiny kitchen under the restaurant where Victor Arguinzoniz grills every single thing. Much of it is done in a Josper, a charcoal-fueled grill inside an oven that was invented in Spain. So Crisp got himself a Josper.

“It cranks food really hot,” Crisp told me. “I really love efficiencies. It allows us to be four guys on a line cranking $4,000 dinners,” he says. He uses it to cook dishes he ate at restaurants on the Basque coast, such as whole grilled fish with garlic crisp and garum (a fish sauce).

But you can knock off a lot of Basque cuisines at his restaurant. He makes the pintxos (tapas) you see people eating in bars in San Sebastián, such as a chicken croketa (croquette). He serves mushrooms, bottarga, and raw egg yolk on a sandwich, though he’s not giving his Santa Barbara customers braised pig ears or codfish bladders…yet. More importantly, he’s making the gooey, burnt-bottomed Basque cheesecake that I ate with Dave Beran at a San Sebastián bar called La Viña, and that he now serves at his Los Angeles restaurant Pasjoli. Only Crisp chisels out a channel in each slice to fill with caviar. At La Viña, you grab a plate of cake off the bar.

You can even, almost, kind of replicate the experience of driving 15 minutes into the mountains outside of San Sebastián to a sagardotegi. These are cider houses, often more than 100 years old, where you stand in front of huge wooden barrels and catch cider into your glass as it flows out like a horse urinating. Then you stand at a wooden table to eat the rarest steak with the biggest salt flakes you will ever be served. Crisp doesn’t go nearly as raw on his grilled bone-in steak. And, yes, he serves cider.

Although his grandmother was a French war bride and he was trained in French techniques, he felt Santa Barbara, with its coast, was more Basque. Plus, he says Spanish chefs seem more encouraging about making their food. “Spanish restaurants are few and far between. So they want you to succeed,” he says. Some have given him advice on the croquettes that he has incorporated into the recipe.

There are other good Basque restaurants in America: the pintxos bars Ernesto’s, Txikito, and Tía Pol in New York City; the Chicago steakhouse Asador Bastian; and an upcoming Basque steakhouse at the Hotel Jackson in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

But if you are willing to travel to places that suck, you can eat the food of Basque shepherds. You can do this in Bakersfield, California; at Boise, Idaho’s Basque Block; or in Winnemucca, Nevada, which is the first place mentioned in Johnny Cash’s version of “I’ve Been Everywhere.”

These were all centers for Basque immigrants who checked into boarding houses located blocks from the nearest train stations that brought them to these towns more than 100 years ago. Many still exist as restaurants that serve the hearty, family-style meals once prepared for the single men who stayed there.

I was driving with my family from San Francisco to Los Angeles on I-5 when we pulled over for food in Bakersfield, California. We walked into Wool Growers restaurant, having no idea why it was called that, and now that I do, I think it’s not a great name for a restaurant. Sure, celebrate the local workers, but “wool growing” doesn’t whet the appetite. No one is opening a restaurant in Appalachia called “Black Lungers.”

But Wool Growers was amazing. We sat at a table with a checkered tablecloth and worried too much about what to order, because it does not matter. Whether you choose garlic-packed fried chicken, garlic-packed oxtail stew, garlic-packed shrimp a la plancha, or a pickled tongue sandwich, you’re here for the “setup,” which is like banchan at a Korean restaurant. Our table was crammed with a bowl of cabbage soup, beans, bread, salsa, salad, tomatoes, French fries, soggy green beans, and, for some reason, spaghetti. All of it is refillable. You will not refill any of them.

This kind of homey, traditional, filling meal is increasingly hard to find. Chef Crisp says it’s not the kind of food he likes to cook, but he enjoys it. In fact, he described the experience perfectly: “When you’re there, you’re looking around and saying, ‘Where’s the salad at?’” Which is exactly correct, even though they set a bottomless bowl of salad at your table.

When people ask me what region I’ve traveled to in America has the most interesting food, I don’t say Bakersfield. But I think it.