The Top 35 Places to Eat Near Laila

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A 19th-century colonial house on the edge of Santander is an unlikely setting for a Michelin-starred tasting menu restaurant, yet here you are, eating algae and Cantabrian anchovies in what feels like someone's beautifully preserved family home. Chef Sergio Bastard runs two menus built around coastal ingredients, with a snack-and-explanation session in the main house before you sit down, which is either charming or theatrical depending on your mood.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A converted 18th-century water mill on the banks of the River Pas, with the old mill wheels still in place and a deconsecrated chapel sitting quietly in the garden. The chef's menu leans into traditional Cantabrian cooking, updated with produce from an on-site kitchen garden, and fish bought at auction that morning. The converted granary next door runs a looser, bistro-style operation. Old stone walls, regional wines, and a menu range that goes from half-portions to a full tasting.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Michelin-starred restaurant perched above Sardinero beach, where the view is genuinely competitive with whatever lands on the plate. The kitchen roots itself in Cantabrian cooking, updating traditional dishes while buying its fish daily at auction, which is why your server recites the catch instead of handing you a printed list. Cheese ice cream, reworked each season, is the house signature. Downstairs there's a bistro called Querida Mar for a less formal evening.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A corner bistro in Santander with bare marble tables, green-and-white walls, and candles that make the room feel more romantic than its casual price point suggests. The kitchen runs on traditional Cantabrian instincts but keeps wandering toward Asia and Latin America, sometimes within the same plate. The Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks. Half-portions are available throughout, so ordering widely is basically encouraged.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

The walls are hung with so much art it doubles as a museum, the Museo Redondo, tucked inside what started as a wine and farm-supply shop. It's a traditional Spanish restaurant now, an old-school institution in Santander, where the menu runs to Rioja-style braised snails and hake with pepper cream. Book ahead, and let the bar talk you into an aperitif before you sit down.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The rabas here, Santander's beloved fried squid, are the kind of thing locals use to settle arguments about where to eat. Cañadío is an old-school Cantabrian restaurant with two warm dining rooms, one built around a bar and an open kitchen. The cooking runs on well-sourced ingredients and no particular interest in impressing you, which ends up being its own kind of impressive. A fixture for anyone who knows the city.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Cave paintings stare down from high ceilings in this two-floor modern restaurant, which makes for a conversation starter before the food even arrives. The room has a raw, brick-walled, New York loft feel, and the cooking matches that energy: contemporary dishes built on Cantabrian tradition, generous enough to share around the table. The kind of place where nothing feels precious, including the service.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Live tanks near the entrance mean your turbot is swimming until you order it, priced by weight the way serious fish restaurants do things. La Bombi is an old-school Santander institution, a small-bar-up-front, several-dining-rooms-behind kind of place in the Puertochico district that keeps its focus squarely on what the sea delivers. Top-quality meats appear on the menu for those who ask, but the seafood is clearly why people keep coming back.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name comes from a black crab that clings to the docks of the Puertochico district, which tells you something about how seriously this seafood restaurant takes its neighborhood. The bar up front runs loud and busy with tapas and raciones, a fish display sprawls beside a live lobster tank, and a calmer dining room sits behind it all. The rice dishes lean hard toward the sea, and the pan-cooked clams have a following.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A three-Michelin-star restaurant set inside an old stone palace in the Cantabrian countryside, where the meal begins with drinks in a glass pavilion before moving into rustic-elegant dining rooms. Chef Jesús Sánchez, recognizable by his cap, built the kitchen around local ingredients and seasonality, with a tasting menu rooted so literally in the surrounding land and sea that the bread alone draws its own applause. The vegetable garden out back is not just for decoration.

1. Michelin Guide 3 Stars

An Einstein quote about bicycles greets you at the door, which tells you something about the chef's former life as a cyclist and current approach to cooking. Set in a grand old Cantabrian house with a patio for aperitivos and rustic-retro rooms inside, this is a tasting menu restaurant built around hyper-local seasonal produce. The menus nod to cycling lore by name, and a visit to the kitchen garden a kilometer away is quietly encouraged. It holds a Michelin star.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name comes from a type of sorrel that grows in cornfields, which tells you something about how seriously this Cantabrian farmhouse restaurant takes its patch of land. Rustic dining room, gastro-bar with high tables for tapas and raciones, a terrace, and cooking that follows the season hard: local fish, steak tartare, stews built around the prized regional Pedresa chicken. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A former post office in a small Cantabrian town, this rustic dining room inside an old stone mansion has Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition and a terrace table or two under the balcony where you can watch the village go entirely unbothered. The chef updates traditional regional cooking without stripping out the soul of it, so the food feels considered rather than fussed over. Unpretentious, unhurried, and not the place anyone stumbles upon by accident.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Tucked into a nature reserve where the mountains meet the Cantabrian Sea, this Michelin-starred restaurant sits inside a boutique hotel that looks like it has been quietly ignoring the last few centuries. The cooking is modern but roots itself firmly in the local and seasonal, with two tasting menus to choose from, one named for sunrise and one for craving, which is a pretty good summary of the experience.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A farmhouse restaurant perched a few metres from the cliff edge, with a 19th-century church as its nearest neighbour. The chef recites the menu aloud each day because it changes with whatever came in that morning, which sounds precious until you taste the result. Honest, traditionally rooted Cantabrian cooking, the kind where the ingredients do most of the talking and the setting does the rest.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Michelin-starred restaurant sitting just steps from Cantabria's patron saint sanctuary, with dining room windows that frame green mountain meadows and grazing cattle close enough to feel theatrical. The kitchen runs on an old family logic, its à la carte a tribute to the chef's mother, while tasting menus push the same Cantabrian landscape into more contemporary territory. Vegetables come from the restaurant's own garden.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A glass-fronted porch dining room looks out over the Cantabrian countryside, and the other room leans rustic stone and timber, so you pick your mood at the door. This is a family-run restaurant where traditional regional recipes have been quietly modernized by the son of the house, who took over and adjusted things by degrees. The Michelin Guide has it on their list. If you need somewhere to sleep, there are a handful of rooms and apartments on the same property.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A husband-and-wife seafood spot on the Cantabrian coast where the menu follows whatever came off the local boats that morning. The starters lean into the sea hard, scallops and sea urchins and grilled octopus arriving before the kitchen moves to large cuts of wild fish and two rice dishes worth planning around. Seating is tight and the place fills fast, so a reservation is less a suggestion than a quiet necessity.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Nets, ropes, and weathered wood set the mood at this old-school family seafood restaurant directly across from the local market in San Vicente de la Barquera. Fish and shellfish are priced by weight, mariscadas arrive for the table to share, and the rice with lobster has been the house calling card for so long the family is credited with putting it on the map. Save room for the cream millefeuille, which earns its reputation quietly.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Stone walls, heavy wood, and a family running the room with the kind of quiet attentiveness that doesn't come from a training manual. This is a regional restaurant in a small Cantabrian town, built around zero-mile sourcing and three tasting menus named for local caves. The cooking is rooted in tradition with a lighter contemporary hand, and the soups and stews, pinto beans with venison among them, are the sort of thing you think about on the drive home.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A three-hundred-year-old holm oak stands at the entrance of the church next door, and the tasting menu is named after the chapel beside it. El Retiro is the more serious dining room of a family business that began as a village tavern, and it holds a Michelin star for the modern Asturian cooking that came out of it. The chef pulls from local ingredients with enough technique to make an Asian-Asturian fusion feel perfectly at home in the hills above Llanes.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

Fabada, tripe, pig's trotter and snout: Le Bistró announces its allegiances early. This casual Asturian spot shares a property with a fine-dining sibling but keeps its own rustic identity, running a menu built on regional cooking that doesn't flinch. The kitchen holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the braised pitu de caleya chicken with mole sauce quietly tells the whole story of Asturian emigration to Mexico in a single dish.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A glass-walled kitchen in a small, unhurried Japanese restaurant in Getxo, where the chef works with the focused calm of someone who isn't performing for the room. The menu leans on Basque produce handled through traditional Japanese method, offered as tasting menus at lunch and dinner. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Bib Gourmand. Let the sommelier talk you into the wine pairing; she generally knows what she's doing.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A family-run restaurant tucked into the Liébana valley at the foot of the Picos de Europa, Del Oso is the kind of mountain dining room where the food tastes like someone's grandmother is running the kitchen. The Lebaniegan cocido is the thing to order, and the homemade desserts are taken seriously. Michelin gives it a Bib Gourmand, and the permanently green hills outside the window do the rest of the selling.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant