A Chosen Place asks us to pick one. For a food issue, that is the hard part. Food travel is everywhere. Bologna, Oaxaca, Hanoi, Lyon. Every region has a case.

But there are towns where the food is the whole reason to go.

San Sebastián is one of those towns. People book the same week each year, walk into the same bars, and know the bartenders by name.

Nineteen Michelin stars in a city of 186,000. Three three-star restaurants. Over two hundred pintxo bars are concentrated in the old town, the Parte Vieja. The numbers are familiar to anyone who has read about the place. They don’t explain why people keep going back.

Marti Buckley, an American chef who has lived in San Sebastián since 2010 and published The Book of Pintxos in 2024, says, “Like no other culture I know, they’re just obsessed with what they eat.”

The ritual is the pintxo crawl, or txikiteo. You stand at the bar, you order one or two small bites, you drink something small with them, and you move on. Regulars repeat the order each time.

The gilda is the original pintxo. Three things on a toothpick: a manzanilla olive, a salt-cured anchovy, a pickled guindilla pepper. Named for the Rita Hayworth character because it is verde, picante, salado. Green, spicy, salty. One bite.

Bar Nestor makes two tortillas de patata a day. One at lunch, one at dinner. Sixteen slices each. The kitchen opens an hour before service to take names, and the slices go out in the order people arrive. The tortilla is made with potatoes and caramelized onions, held together by barely cooked eggs. The outside has a crust. The middle stays soft.

La Viña’s cheesecake is the last stop in most crawls. Burnt on top, almost liquid in the middle. The recipe is not a secret. Writers have been bringing it home for a decade and putting it in their own ovens.

Charlie Brown, a food writer who has been returning to San Sebastián for six years, publishes a food and wine Substack called The Sauce. “San Sebastián does things to people,” he has written. “They call it a pilgrimage. They get misty-eyed when they tell you about their time there.”

There is a second structure beneath the bars. The txoko. Private cooking clubs, most of them more than a century old, many still men-only. Members have keys. They cook for each other, eat together, and bring guests when the rules allow it.

Between the pintxo crawl and the txoko, the city is organized around return.