Where should I eat in Basque Country, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Basque eating begins standing up. The pintxo is the region's unit of pleasure — a small, composed bite on a bar counter, from the classic gilda (olive, anchovy and pickled guindilla pepper, named for Rita Hayworth's film) to hot dishes ordered from the kitchen chalkboard: seared foie, slow-cooked veal cheeks, mushrooms in season. The method is the txikiteo: one or two pintxos and a small glass per bar, then move. San Sebastián's Parte Vieja runs the classic circuit — Ganbara for its wild mushrooms, Borda Berri for braised meats, Bar Sport for foie, and at the old town's edge La Viña, where Santiago Rivera invented the burnt Basque cheesecake in 1990 (the bar itself dates to 1959) and still serves the original — while Bilbao's Casco Viejo and the streets around the Plaza Nueva run the same ritual with fewer tourists. Rule of quality: the best pintxos are the ones cooked to order, not the ones sweating on the counter.

The sit-down classics are built on the Cantabrian catch and the grill. Bacalao al pil-pil — cod emulsified in its own gelatinous juices with olive oil and garlic — and kokotxas, hake cheeks in green sauce, are the two sauces every Basque kitchen is judged by; marmitako, the tuna and potato stew of the fishing fleet, rules late summer when the bonito arrive. Above all there is the txuleta: a bone-in ribeye from mature dairy cattle, grilled over coals, sliced and salted, eaten communally. Its temple in season is the sagardotegi, the cider house: from mid-January to April, around Astigarraga and Hernani, a fixed menu of cod omelette, fried cod with peppers, a whole txuleta to share and Idiazabal cheese with walnuts and quince is served between trips to the barrels at the cry of "txotx!". Idiazabal itself — raw-milk cheese from Latxa sheep, often lightly smoked, protected by its own DOP — is the cheese to bring home, along with a bottle of the coast's wine: txakoli, the lean, faintly sparkling white of the Getaria hillsides (DO Getariako Txakolina, 1989), poured from a height into flat glasses to wake its bubbles.

The summit exists if you want it. The Basque Country holds one of the densest Michelin constellations on earth relative to its size: three-star temples in and near San Sebastián — Arzak (three stars since 1989, now Elena Arzak's kitchen), Akelarre, Martín Berasategui in Lasarte, Azurmendi outside Bilbao — and Asador Etxebarri in Axpe, where Bittor Arguinzoniz grills everything over bespoke embers and sits consistently among the top handful of the World's 50 Best list. Book any of them the day reservations open; eat the rest of the trip standing up.

A Parte Vieja bar at 8 p.m.: the counter a mosaic of plates — peppers, anchovies, a tortilla cut in wedges — the txakoli arcing from bottle to glass, and the whole room performing the ancient choreography of eat, drink, pay, drift next door.

The gilda — arguably the original pintxo, assembled in San Sebastián in the 1940s — contains the whole Basque food philosophy on one toothpick: an olive, a salt-cured anchovy from the Cantabrian fleet and a pickled green chile, three preserved things, zero cooking. And the tortilla has a local heresy: the city's bars are split on whether a proper Spanish tortilla includes onion, and Bar Néstor's twice-a-day tortilla (one at lunch, one at dinner, gone in minutes) is the argument's most delicious exhibit.

• Pintxos at local hours — Graze from about 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. and again after 8 p.m.; between those hours the good kitchens rest
• One splurge, booked early — Choose a single starred table or Etxebarri and reserve the moment booking opens, weeks to months ahead
• Cider in season, txakoli always — January to April for a sagardotegi night; the rest of the year, order Getaria txakoli with grilled fish

January's cider season overlaps San Sebastián's Tamborrada (January 19–20), when the city is impassable and booked out. The great restaurants close for holidays in blocks (often late December–January and a summer stretch), and Etxebarri and the three-stars release tables in batches that vanish in hours. Many Parte Vieja bars close one weekday — commonly Monday or Tuesday — so a single free evening there should be aimed carefully.

Spend your first evening on a Parte Vieja crawl, ending with cheesecake at La Viña; put the txuleta lunch in Getaria or a cider house; and book the one big table before you book anything else.