Why Pinchos Should Be Your next Food Discovery
When It Comes to Mini Bites of Food, Listen to the Spanish
On a zinc-topped bar somewhere in the Basque country — or maybe Rioja — sits a pot full of Gildas. You ask for one and they present you with a cocktail stick piercing a green olive, a Cantabrian anchovy and a spicy pickled guindilla pepper, slicked in olive oil. You eat it in one taste-exploding mouthful. Salt, oil, spice and umami all turned up to 11.
You ask for another (because one is never enough) whilst deciding what pinchos to eat. There are mini croissants filled with jamón — Spain’s gift to the charcuterie world. Slices of bread topped with cheese, Spanish tortilla, crab tartlets, anchovies, sardines. The bartop resembles a wedding buffet but with infinitely more interesting options. Each piece of bread and its topping is skewered with a cocktail stick, which will later tell the bar staff how many pinchos you’ve had, so they know how much to charge you.
You eat, you drink, you move on. Two bars turn into three, into four. Each one has a speciality chalked up above the bar — brochetas of txuleton (aged dairy cow), cep mushrooms, a ‘matrimonio’ sandwich of anchovy, sardine and spicy pepper, suckling pig. You finish with a slice of cheesecake in all its wobbly glory (the cheesecake has to bailar — dance — when it…
