San Sebastian – Kokotxa

A bit tired and dehydrated we arrive to the Astoria7, our home for the next couple of days. The hotel has a movie-theme for each room and Mr Hitchcock is sitting in the lobby. T tries to get some tips, but Mr H is not budging. Our room is dedicated to Anthony Perkins. Luckily there is no full-size figure in the bathroom though.

The hotel cafe gets our nod to satisfy our hunger – and that in a very pleasant way. We get calamares, verduras tempura and toast with jamon iberico in abundant quantities, all washed down with nice white wine. Then we go to the room and spend the next couple of hours with a very tanned Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To catch a thief.

San Sebastian is allegedly the city with the most restaurants with stars in the Michelin guide. This fact might have affected us when we selected the city for one of our destinations in this vacation. Tonight we go to restaurant Kokotxa.
First we get some very nice snacks: Gruyère grisini with avocado cream, a cold tomato-soup. Quite like a gazpacho but with cream or cream cheese and sherry.

First in the menu is marinated tuna with Wasabi and seaweeds. The tuna is perfectly marinated and it is difficult to put a finger on anything, but K would have liked just a little bit more wasabi.

Next we have a serving of scallops and babysquids with spinach clorophyl. This is the dish we are the least impressed with. Either some salt flakes and/or some acidity might have helped. As it is we find it a little bland.

Then we get a slow cooked egg with mushrooms, mandioca (casava) and idiazabal cheese (cheese made from sheep milk).

The egg had the soft texture of a poached undercooked egg but very homogeneous. The mushrooms were crisp and not cooked much and it all went very well together. One of the best dishes of the night.

On we go to halibut served on an emulsion of urchins with calamari rigatone and black ali oil. On top a leaf of a herb with an intense taste of oyster. If anybody who reads this knows the name of the herb, please tell us!

The last of the salty dishes is iberian pork roast served with granny smith apple and passion fruit. The iberian pork has a wonderful taste also as a roast, which is a first for us. To this we get a glass of Ebano red wine form Ribera del Duero, which unfortunately is the only wine we have identified for the evening. We ordered a bottle of white in the beginning on the recommendation of the hostess, but it is located in a distant cooler and we never get to see it properly (which is just a poor excuse for not being able to say something about the wine this evening, save that it was good).

We then get a pre dessert with strings to both the salty kitchen and the sweet: Coconut, lime and curry.
The coconut as a cream, the lime as ice and the curry as a crumble. Very delicious!

Finally a chocolate-orange biscuit with creamy hazelnuts and citrus.














Not being experts in basque or spanish wine it would have been nice to be offered a wine menu, but we were not. To all this we had a glass of cava, the unknown bottle of white, a glass of very nice ribera del duero and finally a moscatel dessert wine. Still this is an excellent dinner and we rate it 8,9/10