About Elkano
Getaria is a fishing village so small it seems possible to walk its cobbled streets end-to-end in under ten minutes. The harbour holds a handful of wooden boats. There is a Gothic church, a single main street that slopes toward the sea, and a restaurant that ranked twenty-fourth in the world. Elkano is the reason people drive forty minutes from San Sebastián along the Basque coast, and one of those rare establishments where the reputation — staggering as it is — lands below the reality of the experience.
The Arregi family have operated the wood-fired grill here since the 1960s. Pedro Arregi developed the technique that made the restaurant famous: cooking whole flat fish — turbot above all, but also sole, bream, and kokotxa — directly over glowing charcoal on hand-crafted grates, in a manner so technically refined that the flesh emerges with its moisture intact and a char that reads as seasoning rather than damage. His son Aitor now runs the kitchen, having worked beside his father long enough to inherit not just the method but the instinct. The turbot at Elkano — a wild-caught fish from the cold Atlantic waters off the Basque coast, cooked whole, served immediately — is as close as a single dish comes to the Platonic ideal of itself.
The menu is built around what the boats brought in that morning. Kokotxa al pil-pil — the gelatinous cod cheek emulsified in olive oil and garlic until it becomes its own trembling sauce — appears when the cod is right. Anchovies from the Bay of Biscay. Spider crab. Percebes from the rocks of the Cantabrian coast, served simply in salt water. The wine list is built around Getariako Txakolina, the local white wine made from Hondarrabi Zuri grapes on the coastal hillsides, its fizzing salinity making it one of the planet's most perfect food wines. A blind tasting menu — twelve courses guided by what the chef has chosen today — runs to approximately €150 per person without wine.
Lunch is the meal. The dining room fills at 1pm and runs until early afternoon, winding down as the fishing boats prepare for the evening. Book months ahead for weekends. Accept immediately if a cancellation appears mid-week. Getting to Elkano is never inconvenient — the drive west along the Basque corniche is spectacular — and the memory of the turbot will last considerably longer than the journey.
Impress Clients — The World's 50 Best in a Fishing Village
There is a particular category of business dining that requires not just excellence but surprise. Clients expect the three-Michelin-star tasting menu in the city. They do not expect to drive along a breathtaking coastal road to a whitewashed fishing village, to be served wild turbot cooked over charcoal that no restaurant in New York or London or Tokyo can quite replicate, to drink wine made from grapes grown on the hillside they can see from the table. Elkano does all of this, and it does it ranked in the top twenty-five restaurants in the world. The combination of extraordinary informality — wooden tables, a room that feels like the boat captain's private dining room — and extraordinary cooking creates the impression that you know something your clients did not know you knew. In business, that impression has value. Book the private dining option for groups requiring complete discretion.