The Best Places in Spain

A family restaurant in central Avilés where the fish changes with whatever came off the boats that morning, and the menu follows suit almost daily. The room leans Art Deco, the cooking leans traditional, and the younger generation in the kitchen keeps nudging both forward. Steak tartare and tripe with chorizo hold down the classics end, while the market suggestions do the more interesting work. Grab the split-level terrace if the weather cooperates.

The courtyard terrace is the draw here, a quiet pocket of calm tucked inside the Hotel Único Madrid in the Salamanca district. It's a bistro with a classically furnished interior and a Mediterranean-leaning menu that runs to sharing plates and tapas alongside more composed dishes. The chef brings a few international notes into the rotation without losing the thread of traditional cooking. Dress is smart-casual; the room skews grown-up.

A former antique dealer's townhouse on a central plaza, with the leftover curios still on the walls to prove it. El Pecado is a mid-range restaurant spread across several floors, running two set menus, one market-led and one tasting format, that roam comfortably between local Castilian instincts and broader European technique. The kind of room that makes you feel like you've found somewhere without really having looked.

A century-old wood-fired oven still runs the show at this Castilian restaurant in Alonso Martínez, where roast lamb and suckling pig are the serious business. The two brothers behind it lean on time-honored recipes from the Meseta without turning the place into a museum piece. The torreznos, oven-roasted and then fried in olive oil, are the kind of thing you order a second round of before finishing the first.

A white-toned terrace a short walk from one of Fuerteventura's longest stretches of sand sets the scene for this creative restaurant, where the chef navigates between Cuban memory and Canarian pantry with a steady hand. The kitchen runs on two tasting menus only, and the cooking leans into unexpected technique, including a goat leg cured and shaved after the fashion of Japanese katsuobushi, a detail that earns its place on the plate.

The kitchen crew runs its own fishing boat out of Cudillero's harbor every morning, so the hake and monkfish arriving at your table are on a tight schedule. This family-run seafood restaurant inside a small hotel has been at it long enough to feel unhurried, with an à la carte that leans into Asturian classics and whatever the sea gave up that day. Order the catch; this is not the moment for anything that doesn't swim.

A glass-fronted kitchen lets you watch the chefs work from the dining room, which sets the tone nicely. This old-school Catalan family restaurant sits in a chalet-style house on the edge of town, with a terrace and two distinct rooms: one for a casual weekday set menu, one with a more polished feel for longer lunches. Three generations in, the cooking stays rooted in the region, with seasonal set menus alongside the à la carte.

Open stonework and a glass-enclosed wine cellar set the mood at this rustic-meets-contemporary restaurant in the Val d'Aran. The kitchen leans into seasonal ingredients and builds a creative menu around them, the kind of place where flame-grilled aubergine ravioli with black garlic and confit baby goat neck sounds like it makes complete sense. Two fixed menus or à la carte, so you can commit as much as the mountain air demands.

Tucked inside the Viñedos de Páganos winery in the Basque countryside, this tasting-menu restaurant shares its name with one of the estate's signature wines. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the vineyards and mountains, so the setting does half the work before a plate arrives. The chef runs two menus, one rooted in tradition, one more adventurous, with some dishes crossing over between them in a loose, à la carte spirit that keeps things from feeling too ceremonial.

A pedestrian street in the center of Sant Climent leads to this family-run Catalan restaurant that has passed through generations without losing its footing. One room handles à la carte, another sits close enough to the kitchen to feel like lunch at someone's house. The menu runs to grilled butifarra, Prat chicken, and chickpeas with lobster, and in cherry season the dessert menu becomes a minor obsession for the chef.

A sunny dining room behind a bar-fronted entrance in Oleiros, with an à la carte that swings from Galician fish and seafood to game when the season allows. The egg yolk soufflé is the kind of thing you order at the start of the meal and then spend the rest of it feeling smug about. A traditional, old-school restaurant that has been feeding the neighborhood long enough to have regulars who know exactly what to order without opening the menu.

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.

A chef who spent years cooking in Madrid before coming home to La Mancha, and the windmill country outside is the whole point. El Retorno sits inside a rural hotel but runs its own room, serving traditional Spanish cooking that leans on the landscape, migas, wild boar, venison, that sort of larder. Tasting menus are the move here, bookable in advance for the whole table, so this is a plan-ahead lunch stop rather than a spontaneous one.

An Italian couple who fell for Menorca now runs this market-driven restaurant across the square from the Santa María de Mahón church. Ingredients come straight off fishing boats and local farms, so the menu shifts with whatever showed up that morning. The kitchen leans Menorcan but can't quite resist a passatelli, the chef's mother's Emilia Romagna recipe, made with island cheese instead of parmesan. The kitchen is fully gluten-free.

Stone walls meet tropical details inside this Triana neighborhood restaurant, where the cooking tracks Canary Island tradition with a Mexican detour that shows up in sauces and technique. The Triana district has the bones of an old Andalucian colony, and El Santo fits the setting without being precious about it. Papa arrugadas with mojo "snow" says something about how seriously the kitchen takes a potato.

A U-shaped bar wraps around the grill so you can watch the team break down the day's catch, plate it, and send it out without much fuss in between. This is a seafood restaurant built entirely around fire, where the cooking stays simple because the fish doesn't need help. The menu changes with what's available and what's in season, so regulars tend to ask what came in rather than open the card.

The open kitchen greets you at the door, and everything on the plate follows from where the chef grew up: Tarragona's coastline on one side, Moroccan roots on the other. This is a modern restaurant where Mediterranean multiculturalism is the actual point, not the marketing. Romesco, Delta molluscs, slow-cooked Iberian pork, argan-tinged aromas; the Camp de Tarragona and the Rift Valley sharing a table. A few set menus plus à la carte.

Dinner is served inside two restored vintage train carriages, one named Vagón Alfonso XIII, parked at a mock platform in the middle of a small Madrid-area town. El Vagón de Beni is a traditional Spanish restaurant where the setting does most of the talking, though the kitchen holds its own with a menu rooted in classic recipes and updated just enough to feel current. Romantic dinners are practically the house specialty.

The stone façade fits so neatly into Barruera's main street that you could walk past it twice. Inside, this small dining room runs on Pyrenean tradition, the kind rooted in mountain pastures and forest floors, with a few unexpected Asian touches folded in without fanfare. Baby goat, wild mushrooms, and cheese from nearby Taüll anchor the menu, with the option to share à la carte or hand yourself over to a surprise tasting menu.

A rustic, intimate dining room in Majadahonda where the kitchen treats traditional Spanish cooking as a starting point rather than a finishing line, folding in flavors from further afield without making a fuss about it. You can order à la carte, go halves on plates if you're grazing, or hand yourself over to the tasting menu. The kind of neighborhood restaurant that takes the food more seriously than the décor, which is exactly how it should be.

The kitchen describes its philosophy as zero-meters rather than zero-kilometers, which tells you something about how seriously this remote restaurant in Aragon takes its surroundings. Housed within a hotel reached by a winding country road, it serves two seasonal menus: one vegetarian, built around foraged flowers and wild plants, and one centered on local meat and fish. Deer and boar wander past the organic gardens outside, which feels about right.

The Torres brothers run this casual Mediterranean restaurant on the Port Olímpic waterfront, where floor-to-ceiling windows frame moored yachts and Nova Icària beach. The menu reads like a tour of the sea: oysters, rice dishes, fideuá, and a rotating fish-of-the-day section that changes with whatever came in. The wine list runs past 400 labels, which is either reassuring or paralyzing depending on your afternoon.

A restored Andalusian mansion in the Valle de Lecrín is not the most obvious place to find contemporary tasting menus with Latin American undertones, and yet here we are. The chef trained under Thomas Keller and brings a creative, international sensibility to the table, with his partner running a warm and polished front of house. Lunch runs shorter; dinner goes the distance.

A Peruvian chef cooking inside an old fisherman's house in Palamós lands on paper like a puzzle, but the menu makes it feel inevitable. The kitchen fuses Catalan coastal cooking with the flavors of Peru, pulling fish daily from the local auction and herbs from its own garden. There's an à la carte and a few set menus to choose from, and the wine list runs to small-producer bottles worth asking about.

Two cooks, one French and one Spanish, share a kitchen in this polished contemporary restaurant in Olot, which is the kind of detail that tells you something about the cooking before you've seen the menu. The focus is on local and seasonal ingredients with a Catalan accent, served à la carte or through a midweek lunch menu and a longer tasting menu called Descobrir. The garden out back supplies the green onions when they're in season.

The desserts here nod to Ibi's old reputation as the ice cream capital of Spain, which is a fine way to end a meal at this contemporary regional restaurant near the town center. The kitchen leans on ingredients from the Foia de Castalla area, turning them into clean, modern dishes. Smaller sharing portions keep the table lively without breaking the bill, and the pricing stays sensibly grounded for cooking this considered.

The dirt track to get here is the first hint that lunch will take a while, in the best possible sense. This rustic seafood restaurant clings to a cliff above the Mediterranean with Es Vedrà rising out of the water below, which does distract from the menu. Rice dishes and fish by weight dominate the à la carte, with bullit de peix, the local fisherman's stew served with arroz a banda, doing most of the talking.

The name borrows from the lights fishermen string out to lure their catch, which sets the mood before you've even sat down. This dinner-only Mediterranean restaurant sits on the upper terrace of a hotel perched above Port de Sóller, and the Sierra de Tramuntana dropping into the sea at sunset is the kind of view that makes the menu feel like a supporting act. Menus center on Mallorcan and Balearic cooking, with an all-vegetable option alongside.

A French chef with stints under Alain Ducasse and Hélène Darroze lands on a busy pedestrian street in Santa Eulalia, running a small à la carte restaurant built around French countryside cooking and whatever Ibiza's markets have that week. The menu moves with the seasons, so the kitchen does most of the deciding for you. Good for a long, unhurried lunch when you're tired of beach bars but not quite ready for ceremony.

Most of the tables sit under a large fig tree in a courtyard lush enough that you forget Sant Antoni's nightlife is a short walk away. This family-run contemporary Mediterranean restaurant draws on local produce, much of it from the family's own kitchen garden, for a menu that runs from rice dishes and fideuás to a full tasting menu. The rustic-Ibizan interior is the backup plan; the courtyard is the reason to book ahead.

A single tasting menu anchored to the Tropical Coast of Granada is the whole idea here, with subtropical fruit and local seafood threading through each small bite. This intimate modern restaurant in a Motril residential neighborhood is easy to miss, which is sort of the point. The chef's shrimp rice, built on a concentrated prawn fumet, is the dish regulars mention unprompted. The Michelin Guide has taken notice.

The tableware is thrown in the basement, which tells you something about how seriously this creative restaurant in Alicante takes its own world-building. Guests move through themed rooms with names like Cocoon Lab and Geoda Verde, each with its own lighting and scent, before landing at a table. Chef Pablo Montoro runs travel-inspired Mediterranean menus that range from a weekday lunch to a full immersive experience where he walks you through his fermentation work personally.

Sitting just outside Yecla near an industrial estate, which is either charmingly unpretentious or a test of conviction depending on your mood, Estirpe is a tasting-menu restaurant where the chef treats his hometown as a culinary crossroads, pulling from the traditions of La Mancha, Alicante, and Murcia at once. Three menus run from seven to eleven courses, and the pre-dessert is named for a local mountain known for cave paintings, which is a lovely way to close a loop.

Maturation chambers line the dining room like glass-fronted relics at a natural history museum, which tells you exactly where the priorities lie. This is a steakhouse at heart, with a Colombian-born chef who ranges wide through starters, fish, and rice before landing on the main event: premium cuts of Rubia Gallega, Simmental, and Black Angus, sold by weight. The desserts, including a trompe l'oeil, take a sharp creative turn.

Stag heads made from every material imaginable line the walls at this contemporary bistro in Vielha, which takes mountain kitsch and runs with it in a knowing way. The menu moves between sharing plates, rice dishes, and a handful of tasting formats, including a fondue for two and a dedicated Palamós prawn menu. Seasonal ingredients get their own spotlight, wild mushrooms in autumn being a reliable draw. Cozy in the way that actually earns the word.

A former glass factory in central Bilbao still shows its bones, and Fernando Canales has kept enough of the industrial shell to make the elegant dining room feel earned rather than decorated. It's a tasting-menu restaurant, two menus deep into creative Basque cooking, where the chef apparently surfs before service each morning and seems to mean it as a philosophy, not a brag. The food follows the same logic: precise, but willing to move with the current.

Set on Reus's main square, this contemporary Spanish restaurant is the hometown project of a chef who came back after training in serious kitchens elsewhere. The menu, named in clothing sizes (S, M, and L), leans creative without losing its Catalan roots, and the coca de calçot in puff pastry with anchovies and romesco is the kind of thing you order without knowing what it is and then think about for days.

The vaulted brick ceiling down below used to store coal; now it's where you eat oxtail ravioli in one of Madrid's more atmospheric dining rooms. The building was the city's oldest hardware store, and the ground-floor bar still has that feel, all worn surfaces and unhurried locals. Traditional Spanish cooking runs through the menu, given a careful modern touch without losing its footing. Tucked off Atocha, it surprises in the way old buildings tend to.

A donut topped with bravas sauce has no business working as well as it apparently does, but that's the kitchen's whole attitude at this casual Mediterranean spot on a tree-lined avenue in Cabo de las Huertas. Downstairs is a bar with a few tables, upstairs a small dining room. The menu moves through tapas, cured meats, preserves, and a calamari sandwich that has almost nothing in common with the Madrid original.

Sitting on the edge of El Pardo, this rustically furnished restaurant feels genuinely removed from Madrid even though the city is minutes away. The kitchen keeps things traditional, leaning on the grill and sourcing fish daily from Pescaderías Coruñesas, a supply chain the regulars will tell you about unprompted. Rice dishes and good cuts of meat round out a menu that changes its tune very little, which is exactly the point.

A short walk from the Bernabéu, this traditional Spanish restaurant is run by two young chefs who split their time between the kitchen and the floor, which keeps things personal in a way that bigger places rarely manage. The cooking leans on classic Spanish recipes but isn't shy about a modern detour, and the dessert course has been known to arrive disguised as something else entirely, which is either charming or alarming depending on your mood.

The corner unit on noisy Calle de Sagasta looks like it forgot to finish being built, all bare concrete and zero cushions, which turns out to be entirely intentional. Fismuler is a contemporary Spanish restaurant run by a team with El Bulli in their past, and that restless, slightly rule-averse energy comes through in the cooking. The room fills with the kind of Madrid crowd that considers a hard chair a reasonable price for a good meal.

When the last order goes in, the kitchen team literally closes a curtain, which tells you everything about how seriously this grill restaurant takes the drama of live-fire cooking. Fish sit in individual racks over the embers alongside meat and vegetables, all managed by a chef who treats smoke and flame as the only tools worth having. Near the Mercado de Colón, and full most nights, so book ahead.

A neighborhood bar in Granada decorated with portraits of celebrated chefs who've passed through, FM has built a following well beyond Andalusia on the strength of its daily haul from the Motril fish market. Quisquilla, cañaíllas, baby whiting, octopus, John Dory: the display case tells you what arrived that morning. It's a bar where you eat standing or perched, and booking ahead is non-negotiable.

A stone building with a glass-fronted dining room looking out over the property's own vineyards sets the tone for this contemporary restaurant in Sant Joan Despí. The kitchen leans hard into seasonality, pulling from an on-site garden of tomatoes, lettuce, herbs, and fruit trees. Two rotating seasonal menus anchor the meal, and the bread, made in-house, arrives in three varieties alongside whatever the garden is giving that week.

The stone facade has been here forever, and the kitchen has been feeding the Matarraña region just as long. This family-run restaurant in a small Aragonese village keeps the old dishes close, including white beans that locals treat as a birthright, while sliding in more contemporary plates alongside them. The room is comfortable and unhurried, and the story about wild partridge once prepared for Picasso during a nearby stay is the kind of detail that makes the menu worth reading slowly.

The escabeches and slow-cooked stews are the whole point here, a traditional Spanish restaurant where the kitchen leans hard into time-honored technique and offal has a genuine seat at the table. Fish and meat come straight from the daily auction, so the menu shifts with the catch. The room runs with the kind of front-of-house attentiveness that feels almost old-fashioned now, which is exactly the draw for the regulars who clearly plan their week around lunch.

The Roca brothers named this restaurant after their mother, Montserrat Fontané, and the food follows the logic of that dedication: traditional Catalan home cooking, recreated in a castle on a mountain summit with a wooden deck and views that make the whole thing feel slightly surreal. The suquet de cabracho arrives on a tomato tartare base rather than the usual broth, which gives you a sense of how "modern twist" is being applied here.

A vegetarian restaurant in El Born where the chef, an Argentine biologist by training, treats plant-based cooking like a lab experiment you actually want to eat. Some dishes arrive as trompe l'oeil illusions, which sounds gimmicky until you're fooled by one. The menu runs à la carte or as set menus, and Santa Maria del Mar is just around the corner if you need to walk off the conviction that vegetables are, in fact, the point.

A sushi bar steps from Gijón's marina, where the counter seats eight and the fish is aged in-house, which is the kind of detail that tends to separate the committed from the casual. The menu is compact, Japanese in its bones but built around the catch from the Bay of Biscay, with nigiris given serious attention and an omakase format designed for sharing. It skews young and informal without being careless about it.

A converted shop in Santiago's old town, Gaio runs on sharing plates built from Galician seasonal produce and pulled in several directions at once, Peruvian and Asian among them. The open kitchen sits behind a dining counter, the mood is low-key, and the menu quietly credits the chef's grandmother and aunt as its origin story. Charcoal-grilled chicken with Chinese cabbage turns up alongside mackerel with grapes, which is a combination you don't see everywhere.

The wooden doors open onto one of San Sebastián's old town pintxos bars, where the counter is stacked and standing room fills fast. Downstairs there's a seated restaurant with a family-run feel if you'd rather sit. Wild mushrooms with egg yolk is the signature worth arriving early for. Juan Mari Arzak was a regular, which tells you something about the caliber of the crowd this place attracts.

Sections of the old city wall are visible inside the dining room, which feels like a reasonable metaphor for what Garum 2.1 does with food: Cordoban recipes pulled into the present tense. This family-run modern restaurant offers both à la carte and tasting menus, the kitchen reworking regional classics with enough imagination to have picked up a string of tapas competition wins along the way.

A glass-fronted wine cellar and an open kitchen visible from the dining room set the tone at this modern French restaurant tucked inside a medieval village. The chef leans on seasonal Catalan ingredients while keeping one eye firmly on French technique, with set menus running from a compact weekday lunch to an eight-course tasting. The room is polished without being stiff, the kind of place that makes a detour through Altafulla feel like a reasonable decision.

A block from the beach in Chipiona, this small, informal fusion spot takes its name from the fresh shoots of coriander and decorates its walls with graffiti, which tells you something about the mood. The young chef trained under Dani García and Dabiz Muñoz, and the short, rotating menu mixes Andalusian roots with Japanese touches. Eight seats at the bar are the ones to aim for.

A small bistro near Glorieta de Bilbao where the chef's handmade pasta doubles as the entire point of coming. The team trained under Dabiz Muñoz at DiverXo, and the Italian instincts are intact, though a Thai-inflected burrata or a cod-and-pil-pil ravioli suggests the kitchen isn't above a detour. The menu is short on purpose, long on handmade pasta, and the whole room reads like a love letter to a Neapolitan grandmother, which is exactly what it is.

The chef's childhood in Almería and his years cooking in the Netherlands make an unlikely but coherent pair on the plate. This contemporary Mediterranean restaurant runs on a single surprise tasting menu, where local red prawns and gurullos pasta meet Japanese and Peruvian notes without any of it feeling like a geography lesson. Wine pairings are available, and the room feels like somewhere a cook opened a restaurant because he actually wanted to, not to impress anyone.

Handmade pasta built from a family recipe is the whole argument here, and a Piedmontese chef making it in Madrid gives the room a quietly confident feel. Gioia is a small Italian restaurant where the menu runs à la carte or a tasting menu that riffs on the overlap between Italian and Spanish cooking. Truffle turns up often, and the tagliatelle made with forty egg yolks is the dish regulars tend to mention unprompted.

The croquettes here started life at Casa Marcial, the family's more serious project up the road, and they followed the Manzano siblings south to this relaxed, designer-ish dining room on a Gijón plaza. It's a share-plates kind of place, Spanish at heart with the odd fusion detour, and you can pull up a stool at the bar to watch things come together. The menu skews convivial, which suits the room perfectly.

Ignacio Goitia's murals cover the walls, giving this elegant dining room a quietly art-forward feel that suits the French-Basque cooking coming out of the kitchen. The chef trained at Azurmendi and brings those northern flavors south to Madrid, sourcing from small producers and letting servers recite the off-menu options aloud, old-school style. Dress up a little; this is the kind of place where the room expects it.

Sitting right on the seafront in Bakio, this family-run Basque restaurant has been passed down through three generations and now belongs to two sisters, one in the kitchen, one running the room. The menu follows the season and the catch, so asking what came in that morning is not a bad move. The terrace table at sunset is the kind of thing locals act casual about while quietly booking weeks ahead.

A bar-turned-restaurant with a Valencia film festival in its past, Goya Gallery has been filling tables with regulars long enough that the rice dishes sell out before noon if you haven't called ahead. The Mediterranean menu leans on honest starters and the house specialty of dry and honeyed rice, which the kitchen takes seriously enough to require a morning reservation. Old-school in the best, least-ironic sense.

Rice for two minimum, grilled fish straight from the market, and a blackboard of specials that changes daily: Gran Azul keeps its focus narrow and its dining room full. The look is rustic-meets-modern, the kind of place that feels settled without feeling tired. It sits just off the Plaza de Zaragoza, and the simple formula of rice dishes and quality grilled meat or fish has kept Valencia coming back without any apparent need for reinvention.

Tucked at the end of a quiet alley lined with luxury boutiques, this intimate contemporary restaurant is easy to walk past and hard to forget. The two chefs, one from Madrid and one from Rome, cook a short menu that folds Spanish and Italian traditions together without making a fuss about the concept. The room is small, the menu tighter still, and the cooking lands with the confidence of people who don't need the extra words.

The menu at this modern restaurant is organized like a road trip through Aragon and the Cinco Villas region, with each dish anchored to the landscape around it. The chef came up through big-name kitchens before returning home to cook on his own terms, and the tasting menu and rotating daily plates show the range. Locals who know his tapas competition record fill the room with a certain confidence about what's coming.

A small creative restaurant tucked into a residential corner of the city, where the open kitchen means you can watch the team think. Two tasting menus change constantly, built around textures and techniques that lean into biology and chemistry without announcing it. The mood is personal and a little restless, as if the chef finds repetition genuinely offensive. The Michelin Guide has taken notice.

Fire is the organizing principle at this Argentine grill in Chamberí, where the kitchen takes its cues from Mendoza's wine country and treats the hearth as something close to a philosophy. The chef behind it has deep roots in the Argentine wine world, and that terroir sensibility shapes everything on the plate. You can go à la carte or commit to a ten-course tasting menu, both of which make the case that smoke and good beef need very little help.

An adults-only rural retreat in the Sierra de Gata that raises its own goat, Iberian pork, and a Retinto-Wagyu cross, then grills them in a semi-open kitchen while you watch cattle graze through floor-to-ceiling windows. The asador restaurant leans hard into regional tradition, and the à la carte is essentially a love letter to Extremaduran meat. A hammam, an olive oil mill, and a gourmet boutique round things out for guests who plan to stay awhile.

The nigiris here are dressed with a half-and-half split of traditional rice vinegar and Modena balsamic, which tells you exactly where this omakase restaurant is coming from. The chef grew up in Piedmont and trained in Japan, and the menu reads accordingly, threading Italian instincts through Japanese technique. Sit at the bar for the full counter experience, or book the private room if you prefer your fusion with fewer witnesses.

Stone walls, bare wood tables, and a bar counter that does serious work set the tone at this Basque restaurant in Salamanca. The kitchen runs a broad à la carte of tapas, small plates, vegetables from Aranjuez and Bizkaia, Cantabrian fish, and good cuts of meat. The Zalla red onion tarte tatin keeps coming up in conversation for a reason. Madrid with a northern accent, and no performance about it.

The name is an abbreviation of "hidden," which tells you what you're in for: a small, dimly lit restaurant tucked between La Latina and Plaza Mayor that feels like it's trying not to be found. The tasting menus weave Galician seafood and Mexican technique together, with house cocktails built in as the official liquid course rather than an afterthought. Somewhere between fine dining and a speakeasy that forgot to stop serving food.

Páganos sits in the middle of La Rioja Alavesa wine country, which makes a cozy tasting-menu restaurant run by a husband-and-wife team feel like an entirely sensible idea. He cooks contemporary Basque food built around whatever the season hands him; she runs the room and knows the local bottles cold. The menu comes in two lengths, so you're not committed to the full voyage if you'd rather not be.

The restaurant sits inside a working txakoli winery, with big windows framing the vineyards and mountains so you don't forget where you are for a second. The chef, always in a traditional beret, runs a menu rooted in Basque classics, cooking the stews over wood and charcoal and pulling the appetizers straight from his garden. Spider crab, stuffed baby squid, Tolosa beans: the Basque hits parade, done with conviction.