Txikiteo: The Basque Bar Crawl
The board at Bar Bacaicoa in Bilbao looks like a menu but reads like a catechism: button mushroom a la gloria, in heaven, chorizo al infierno, in hell, and wild mushroom al purgatorio, in purgatory. Each one has a price per piece and a price per six. It would never occur to anyone to sit down here for dinner. This is one stop on a route.
Txikiteo is the Basque habit of doing the rounds of the old town bars with your friends and drinking one small glass standing at the counter in each of them - wine, txikito, or beer, zurito - along with one or two pintxos that the place happens to be famous for. In Spain people go out for tapas just about everywhere; in the Basque Country they do it by the book.
A Small Word for a Big Habit: What Txikiteo Means and Where People Do It
The name is bilingual, just like Bilbao itself. Basque txiki means small, a txikito is a small measure of wine, and the Castilian suffix -eo turned it into an activity: going out for small ones. It's pronounced chee-kee-TEH-oh. The word says nothing about the bar, the food or the company. It only says how much goes in the glass. In the Basque Country the same thing is also called poteo, from pote, a glass, and it was in that form that the habit crossed the border: people do it from Bilbao to San Sebastián, but also in Navarre, in La Rioja and across a good chunk of Cantabria. The rest of Spain has tapeo: there you sit down and order, here you stand up and move on. At the counter you'll run into a gilda, into txakoli poured from a height, and if you're feeling brave, a kalimotxo as well. Txikiteo is a way to get through all of them in a single afternoon.
Txikiteros from the Seven Streets and the Bullfighter Who Gave His Name to a Small Beer
The habit is older than the pintxos that tourists come for today. Groups from Bilbao's Casco Viejo, the seven streets of the old town, started going out for txikitos at the end of the 19th century, and back then it was about wine, about singing and about whose turn it was to pay. The food arrived on the counter later, from San Sebastián, where bars began setting a small skewered bite next to the wine. Beer was the last to join the ritual, and it took its name from the bullring. In the 1960s Zurito was the name of a bullfighting fan club in San Sebastián, called after a bullfighter with that nickname, and when one of its members started asking for his beer in a smaller glass in the bars of the old quarter, the smaller beer ended up with the club's name. The bullfighter's nickname came from a pigeon with pale rings around its eyes, so the Basque small beer is named after a bird, by way of the bullring. Bilbao, for its part, holds on to its txikiteros: every year on 11 October, the feast day of the city's patron saint, they walk the old town with a procession, with singing and with a tin for whatever change is left over from the rounds, and the money goes to charity. Young Basques today are more likely to go for a zurito than a txikito, if they go at all.
How Txikiteo Works: The Glass, the Counter and the Cuadrilla
Txikiteo has three ingredients: the glass, the counter and the cuadrilla, a group of friends who have been doing the same route together, in the same company, for years. The txikito glass is short, thick-walled and heavy, with a few mouthfuls of wine in it; a zurito is beer in the same format. Nobody orders a pint here, because a pint would mean you're staying. One glass at the bar, one or two pintxos, pay and move on. You either take turns paying for the rounds or pay out of the bote, a common kitty that everyone chips a few euros into at the start and one person carries around all afternoon.
Traditionally people went in the morning, before lunch; these days the late afternoon is more common, between the end of work and dinner, which in Spain won't start much before nine anyway. Tourists tend to make one mistake: they sit down. At a table you get a big meal and miss everything else - at the counter you can see what other people are ordering, and the board tells you what the locals come here for. Read the whole thing: the price for six isn't a portion for one, it's a portion for the cuadrilla, and the "two of each" combination at the bottom is for anyone who wants to taste the entire bar in a single stop. The toast is osasuna, health - though purists will point out that it's only a translation of the Spanish salud and that a real Basque says topa.
A Small Plate on Plaza de Unamuno
Bar Bacaicoa has stood on Plaza de Unamuno, on the edge of Bilbao's old town, since 1965 (see Where to Eat in Bilbao) and by Bilbao standards the selection on the counter is modest; the board is what it's known for. I picked two things off it, plus a zurito. The button mushroom a la gloria arrived with its cap full of garlic sauce, which is better eaten in one bite than left to run out onto the plate, and the chorizo al infierno came in a small baguette, flambéed to a crisp on the outside and more smoky than hot inside. Hell in Bilbao is mild. The zurito was cold and there was just enough of it to wash the food down. According to the board, the mushroom cost 1.10 EUR and the chorizo 1.80 EUR; I don't remember the price of the beer and it isn't on the board. So I made it through heaven and hell for 2.90 EUR. I left purgatory for next time.
