A Seat at Every Bar, and the Numbered Balconies

Pintxo bars in San Sebastián are standing-room by nature, and after three hours of it your legs know. This tour holds reserved seats for the group at every stop, which is unusual enough to be the reason to pick it.

The structure is the pintxo across time, from the classic to the avant-garde, in that order, so you can taste what changed.

It opens at the Bretxa market with Iberian ham from corn-fed pigs, good chorizo, local cheese, olives, olive oil, and the gilda: an olive, an anchovy and a pickled guindilla pepper on a stick, invented here in the 1940s and named after the Rita Hayworth film because it was green, salty and a little spicy. It is the original pintxo and everything else descends from it. When the market is closed, on Saturday and Monday afternoons, Sundays and holidays, two extra pintxos replace it.

The second stop is the operator's version of a gastronomic society, the private cooking clubs that Basque men have run since the nineteenth century, where members cook for each other and outsiders almost never get in.

You cross the Plaza de la Constitución, where the balconies carry painted numbers because the square was a bullring and the flats above were rented out as seats. Then Calle Mayor, once the elegant street, with the theatre, the casino and the basilica on it, and a bar working with the best local produce. The fourth stop is one of the newest kitchens in the old town.

Dessert is traditional, at a classic bar, with a Basque liqueur.

Eight plates beyond the market tasting, four local drinks including txakoli, Rioja and natural cider, with a non-alcoholic welcome available. Nine guests maximum, guided in English. You also get the operator's own written guide to bars and restaurants, for the days after.

Meet between the McDonald's and the sports shop on the Boulevard, ten minutes early. The group does not wait, and a late arrival counts as a no-show. There are taxis on the Boulevard; there is no Uber in the city.