Indulging in American Basque Cuisine

The Basques followed the sheep from Europe to the western United States and they brought with them their boardinghouse cuisine

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Family-style dinner at the Noriega Hotel
Family-style dinner at the Noriega Hotel includes cabbage soup, pickled tongue and bowls of spicy Basque salsa. (Ann Summa)

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There are a lot of reasons to go through Bakersfield, California, even if you don’t happen to be in the oil business or on your way to a mountain lake. Bakersfield is where the “western’’ in country and western was forged, and you can still hear the spiritual descendants of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens in the clubs. Dewar’s, out near the high school, may be the best unreconstructed ice-cream parlor in the country, famous for its banana splits and its peanut butter chews; the lunches of pasta and beans at Luigi’s, in business since 1910, speak of traditions that had faded in New York by the start of the First World War. But when you find yourself in Bakersfield, either accidentally or on the way to somewhere else, the first thing you’ll look for is likely to be a Basque restaurant—one of the old restaurants out by the Union Pacific station just east of town. The late Chief Justice Earl Warren, son of a railroad hand, grew up in a modest house a few blocks away.

People argue whether the best Basque food in Bakersfield is served at the Pyrenees, where the ancient, dark woodwork is still intact, at the diner-like Benji’s or at Wool Growers, where an extra buck will buy you a blizzard of freshly chopped garlic on your fried chicken. The 119-year-old Noriega Hotel, the oldest and most famous of the half-dozen or so Bakersfield Basque restaurants, was honored by the James Beard Foundation last year as an American classic. After the ceremony, Rochelle Ladd and Linda McCoy, whose family has run Noriega’s since 1931, were mobbed by admiring chefs. The Basque house cocktail, Picon Punch, served everywhere, has become a grail among cocktailians. And although the culinary traditions are 80 years removed from the homeland, the restaurants retain a bit of the glamour of the Basque Country itself, where restaurants like Arzak, Mugaritz and Asador Etxebarri rank with the very best in the world.

The Basque Country is kind of the obsession of the food world at the moment, home to a concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants that could make Paris blush in envy, a variety of local seafood perhaps unmatched in the world and a culture of eating that demands high quality and innovation in smoky cider houses as well as temples of cuisine. It is one of the most prosperous regions of Europe, and its government supports the culinary arts nearly as assiduously as it does its famous museums. If culinary modernism has a spiritual home in the era after elBulli, the fabled Spanish restaurant that closed last year, it is probably in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa.

So a traveler experiencing American Basque cooking for the first time, perhaps at Wool Growers in Los Banos in California’s Central Valley, or at lunchtime at a Mexican joint called Margaritas in Ely, Nevada, the last crumb of Basque cooking left in that remote mining town, could be forgiven for wondering if the plain, meaty cooking nurtured in American Basque boardinghouses had anything to do with the intricate, seafood-intensive cuisine of San Sebastián or Biarritz or how a region famous for its sophisticated industrial culture produced a diaspora whose roots seemed to be exclusively in sheepherding—and restaurants as close to 19th-century dining as anything in the United States, scattered among the old sheep towns of the West. We can only marvel and nod, mostly because we have a plate of oxtail stew to attend to.

American Basque food is famous less for its refinement than for its heartiness, often a dozen or more courses served family style from enormous platters on long, communal tables protected with worn oilcloth. The places where it appears are often the remnants of a once-great archipelago of Basque hotels, built to serve as a bit of home for immigrant sheepherders, stretching from Southern California all the way up to Boise, Idaho. The hotels served as boardinghouses, social centers and informal banks in the smallish Basque communities they served—full-service operations where the famously difficult Basque language was both spoken and understood, where a sheepherder could find a job, property or even a spouse. (The hotels tended to be staffed by young female immigrants.)

When you are looking for the Basque boardinghouses that survive today, or the restaurants that occupy their ground floors, you will never do wrong by heading for the oldest part of town, down by the railroad tracks. As an experiment not long ago, I decided to try to find a Basque place in Fresno without first looking up a name or an address, and I managed to find the Basque Hotel within five minutes: square building, mournful train whistle and all. In some parts of Nevada, this often puts the restaurants within a block or two of the red-light district, although it does not look as if the two types of establishments have an overlapping customer base.

If you want American Basque food in its purest form, follow I-80 through northern Nevada. One bitterly cold week this winter I pointed my truck toward Nevada and tried to see how many Basque restaurants I could visit over the course of a long weekend. I stopped by the Star Hotel in Elko for a dish the menu called a Boarder’s Lunch, thinly sliced beef pan-fried with onions and chiles, and also for a delicious pork loin sautéed with roasted red peppers; then to Toki Ona a few blocks away for roast lamb and potatoes. In Winnemucca, a couple of hours west, there was the splendid Martin Hotel, crammed with hunters in town for bighorn season—I felt naked without a camouflage cap—where I had steak Martin, which is a big grilled rib-eye buried under a mountain of mushrooms and garlic, and also something very like chicken-fried sweetbreads with country gravy. The next morning I drove down to Louis’ Basque Corner in Reno (garlicky tripe, although I was disappointed the famous rabbit wasn’t on the lunch menu) and continued on to JT in Gardnerville, south of Carson City, for a dish of tripe stewed with pigs’ feet that made the waitress squirm but made me very happy. As is customary in American Basque restaurants, when you order the main course, you end up with a half-dozen secondary courses. Two Basque meals a day feels like the triathlon of Old West eats.

I loved the Nevada restaurants. But still, I couldn’t wait to get back to Bakersfield, which feels like home. I tend to pass through maybe three or four times a year, and over the last couple of decades I have struck up conversations with ranchers and artists and retired schoolteachers, construction guys and roustabouts, couples on the snowbird circuit, 9-year-old boys sulking because their parents wouldn’t let them at the flasks of rough wine included in the price of their dinners, and an Elko farm-equipment man who carried in his wallet a creased photograph of what he said was his mother sunbathing topless in Biarritz in the months before World War II.

And more predictable than the company in Bakersfield is the pattern of the dinner: tureens of cabbage soup served with bowls of beans and a spicy Basque tomato sauce, followed by platters of thinly sliced pickled tongue, cottage cheese stirred with mayonnaise, boiled vegetables with white sauce, and a very fresh, very plain salad made with lettuce grown in the next town. The bread comes from the Pyrenees Bakery just around the corner.

If you happen to be at the Noriega Hotel, the only Bakersfield Basque place that still functions as a boardinghouse, this procession of dishes, known as a “set-up,’’ is only half of the meal. The set menu changes daily, but there will typically be a tureen of lamb or beef stew, a plate of overboiled spaghetti in tomato sauce, and finally the main course of fried chicken or baked spare ribs or leg of lamb accompanied by vast platters of hand-cut French fries that still have the flavor of the field about them. If you are a 9-year-old boy, you will be given a scoop of sherbet, and after dinner you will throw a tennis ball around the adjoining tennis court while your parents linger at the bar for a last Picon Punch. Life is as it ever was at Noriega, except that you hear a bit less Basque spoken with each passing year, and the Picon Punch, a formidable highball of brandy, grenadine and a bitter tincture of herbs, is made with a domestic liqueur instead of the unavailable Amer Picon from France. Is there anything better than watching a burly ranch hand snarl “Gimme Picon’’ at a barkeep? Only drinking one yourself.


There are a lot of reasons to go through Bakersfield, California, even if you don’t happen to be in the oil business or on your way to a mountain lake. Bakersfield is where the “western’’ in country and western was forged, and you can still hear the spiritual descendants of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens in the clubs. Dewar’s, out near the high school, may be the best unreconstructed ice-cream parlor in the country, famous for its banana splits and its peanut butter chews; the lunches of pasta and beans at Luigi’s, in business since 1910, speak of traditions that had faded in New York by the start of the First World War. But when you find yourself in Bakersfield, either accidentally or on the way to somewhere else, the first thing you’ll look for is likely to be a Basque restaurant—one of the old restaurants out by the Union Pacific station just east of town. The late Chief Justice Earl Warren, son of a railroad hand, grew up in a modest house a few blocks away.

People argue whether the best Basque food in Bakersfield is served at the Pyrenees, where the ancient, dark woodwork is still intact, at the diner-like Benji’s or at Wool Growers, where an extra buck will buy you a blizzard of freshly chopped garlic on your fried chicken. The 119-year-old Noriega Hotel, the oldest and most famous of the half-dozen or so Bakersfield Basque restaurants, was honored by the James Beard Foundation last year as an American classic. After the ceremony, Rochelle Ladd and Linda McCoy, whose family has run Noriega’s since 1931, were mobbed by admiring chefs. The Basque house cocktail, Picon Punch, served everywhere, has become a grail among cocktailians. And although the culinary traditions are 80 years removed from the homeland, the restaurants retain a bit of the glamour of the Basque Country itself, where restaurants like Arzak, Mugaritz and Asador Etxebarri rank with the very best in the world.

The Basque Country is kind of the obsession of the food world at the moment, home to a concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants that could make Paris blush in envy, a variety of local seafood perhaps unmatched in the world and a culture of eating that demands high quality and innovation in smoky cider houses as well as temples of cuisine. It is one of the most prosperous regions of Europe, and its government supports the culinary arts nearly as assiduously as it does its famous museums. If culinary modernism has a spiritual home in the era after elBulli, the fabled Spanish restaurant that closed last year, it is probably in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa.

So a traveler experiencing American Basque cooking for the first time, perhaps at Wool Growers in Los Banos in California’s Central Valley, or at lunchtime at a Mexican joint called Margaritas in Ely, Nevada, the last crumb of Basque cooking left in that remote mining town, could be forgiven for wondering if the plain, meaty cooking nurtured in American Basque boardinghouses had anything to do with the intricate, seafood-intensive cuisine of San Sebastián or Biarritz or how a region famous for its sophisticated industrial culture produced a diaspora whose roots seemed to be exclusively in sheepherding—and restaurants as close to 19th-century dining as anything in the United States, scattered among the old sheep towns of the West. We can only marvel and nod, mostly because we have a plate of oxtail stew to attend to.

American Basque food is famous less for its refinement than for its heartiness, often a dozen or more courses served family style from enormous platters on long, communal tables protected with worn oilcloth. The places where it appears are often the remnants of a once-great archipelago of Basque hotels, built to serve as a bit of home for immigrant sheepherders, stretching from Southern California all the way up to Boise, Idaho. The hotels served as boardinghouses, social centers and informal banks in the smallish Basque communities they served—full-service operations where the famously difficult Basque language was both spoken and understood, where a sheepherder could find a job, property or even a spouse. (The hotels tended to be staffed by young female immigrants.)

When you are looking for the Basque boardinghouses that survive today, or the restaurants that occupy their ground floors, you will never do wrong by heading for the oldest part of town, down by the railroad tracks. As an experiment not long ago, I decided to try to find a Basque place in Fresno without first looking up a name or an address, and I managed to find the Basque Hotel within five minutes: square building, mournful train whistle and all. In some parts of Nevada, this often puts the restaurants within a block or two of the red-light district, although it does not look as if the two types of establishments have an overlapping customer base.

If you want American Basque food in its purest form, follow I-80 through northern Nevada. One bitterly cold week this winter I pointed my truck toward Nevada and tried to see how many Basque restaurants I could visit over the course of a long weekend. I stopped by the Star Hotel in Elko for a dish the menu called a Boarder’s Lunch, thinly sliced beef pan-fried with onions and chiles, and also for a delicious pork loin sautéed with roasted red peppers; then to Toki Ona a few blocks away for roast lamb and potatoes. In Winnemucca, a couple of hours west, there was the splendid Martin Hotel, crammed with hunters in town for bighorn season—I felt naked without a camouflage cap—where I had steak Martin, which is a big grilled rib-eye buried under a mountain of mushrooms and garlic, and also something very like chicken-fried sweetbreads with country gravy. The next morning I drove down to Louis’ Basque Corner in Reno (garlicky tripe, although I was disappointed the famous rabbit wasn’t on the lunch menu) and continued on to JT in Gardnerville, south of Carson City, for a dish of tripe stewed with pigs’ feet that made the waitress squirm but made me very happy. As is customary in American Basque restaurants, when you order the main course, you end up with a half-dozen secondary courses. Two Basque meals a day feels like the triathlon of Old West eats.

I loved the Nevada restaurants. But still, I couldn’t wait to get back to Bakersfield, which feels like home. I tend to pass through maybe three or four times a year, and over the last couple of decades I have struck up conversations with ranchers and artists and retired schoolteachers, construction guys and roustabouts, couples on the snowbird circuit, 9-year-old boys sulking because their parents wouldn’t let them at the flasks of rough wine included in the price of their dinners, and an Elko farm-equipment man who carried in his wallet a creased photograph of what he said was his mother sunbathing topless in Biarritz in the months before World War II.

And more predictable than the company in Bakersfield is the pattern of the dinner: tureens of cabbage soup served with bowls of beans and a spicy Basque tomato sauce, followed by platters of thinly sliced pickled tongue, cottage cheese stirred with mayonnaise, boiled vegetables with white sauce, and a very fresh, very plain salad made with lettuce grown in the next town. The bread comes from the Pyrenees Bakery just around the corner.

If you happen to be at the Noriega Hotel, the only Bakersfield Basque place that still functions as a boardinghouse, this procession of dishes, known as a “set-up,’’ is only half of the meal. The set menu changes daily, but there will typically be a tureen of lamb or beef stew, a plate of overboiled spaghetti in tomato sauce, and finally the main course of fried chicken or baked spare ribs or leg of lamb accompanied by vast platters of hand-cut French fries that still have the flavor of the field about them. If you are a 9-year-old boy, you will be given a scoop of sherbet, and after dinner you will throw a tennis ball around the adjoining tennis court while your parents linger at the bar for a last Picon Punch. Life is as it ever was at Noriega, except that you hear a bit less Basque spoken with each passing year, and the Picon Punch, a formidable highball of brandy, grenadine and a bitter tincture of herbs, is made with a domestic liqueur instead of the unavailable Amer Picon from France. Is there anything better than watching a burly ranch hand snarl “Gimme Picon’’ at a barkeep? Only drinking one yourself.

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Comments (17)

ANY chance I can get the recipe for the basque cabbage soup? I am just craving it. Had it many times at basque resturants in bakersfield Thank yu for trying Joni Simon

Posted by Joni Simon on January 17,2013 | 07:00 PM

They followed the sheep from Europe to the western United States?

Posted by hickdog on August 1,2012 | 10:04 PM

Friends of mine have been sending me copies of this article for the past 2 months and, after the latest, I decided I needed to comment on the welling of emotional memories that this article has triggered. My mother passed away in November, having come from Spain in 1955. My father, a sheepherding pioneer in the Central Valley, passed away in 1992 (at the age of 92). We lived 26 miles from Bakersfield in Wasco, which was still another 30 miles from my dad's sheep ranch in Lost Hills. We went to Basque restaurants every weekend for dinner and Noriega's was a special treat, in it's own way, just as Woolgrower's, Chalet Basque (originally in Wasco), Chateau Basque, etc. were. The long "family style" tables at Noriega's, especially, were inclusive experiences but it didn't take long for my brothers and me to figure out that, by scoping out the middle of the table (not sure how we did it every time), we'd have both "Flan bowls" (one from each end) meet in front of us for a fantastic end to a great meal. As the son of Spanish-Basque immigrants, I am proud and in awe of what my parents were able to accomplish in the United States, even while I also witnessed (even as a young boy) the challenges they faced as non-native English speakers. They (and the whole of the Basque community) are another example of the power of immigrant populations and, specifically, why it is so important to not judge immigrants (especially non-English speakers) by the immigrants, themselves... They come here to make a better life, not for themselves but for their children. What their children go on to accomplish is the true demonstration of the power of immigrants' American Dream. Thanks for this article and it's reminder of a life-past for me, and the great richness of heritage left to us by our family, even as I live nearly 2,000 miles away in Ann Arbor. Pete Montero Wasco, California/Ann Arbor, Michigan

Posted by Pete Montero on May 29,2012 | 02:18 PM

My Mother work at the Basque on 21st street for the Etheverry back in the late 60's and 80's She loved working for them her name was Helen May.She than went to work for Matias Frankie and his DaD open up the one on Union Ave. She work there till she retired. At 72 years old. My Son Roger Her grandson also was a bus boy in the 70's and saw lots of old movie stars. that dined there on weekends. I miss the clam chowder could buy it in the gallon on fridays. Way back the Basque on 21st st. served more food than you could eat. We would do a family dinner just befor Christmas. But they removed the whole building? to old. the Etheverry open up the old saddle building on Union Ave. But that to is gone.

Posted by Janie Paulk on May 21,2012 | 07:56 PM

I've been talking about the fried garlic chicken at Château Basque in Bakersfield for years. What a relief to know it -- along with the pickled tongue -- wasn't a figment of my memory. As I prepare for a trip to Pays Basque next week, I am thrilled to relive my first encounters with Basque cuisine as a little girl traveling to visit family in Fresno. Thank you!

Posted by Ann on May 17,2012 | 05:34 AM

This article brought back many wonderful memories, my parents took me to the wonderful Basque restaurants mentioned in your article when I was 12 years old, my favorite was the Pyrenees restaurant in Bakersfield. Today I live in TExas and would love to know if there are any Basque restaurants in the Houston area, I love the marinated tongue salad and find myself at present getting ready to go to the market today and cook my own! Awesome article, kudos to the author.

Posted by Gwen Crockett-Bailey on May 8,2012 | 06:28 AM

As a homesick native of Los Banos Calif Let say a big YUM YUM for Woolgrowers as a 100% Basque Sheep herders daughter I grew up in Los Banos Wool Growers is always a perfect place for having lunch or dinner! I also want to bput in my recomendation for the Los Banos Basque Picnic the third Sat in May. the Basque people are ery loving and like to party! Thank you for the story.

Posted by Michelle Etcheverry on April 26,2012 | 03:27 PM

Great article about the Basque community in Bakersfield. I'll add the great times I had at the annual Basque Picnic in Bakersfield in the '60s. It started at the Kern River Picnic grounds and continued into the wee hours of the night in the "Basque Community" you mentioned near the Baker Street train depot.

Posted by Jim Windes on April 25,2012 | 04:54 PM

JT's Basque Restaurant in Gardnerville, NV is located in the beautiful Carson Valley. A must see if you are traveling anywhere near Lake Tahoe and Reno. Just be sure to get the garlic on your steak ... as we say in the south "its so good it'll make you slap your momma"

Posted by Lee Bonner on April 24,2012 | 11:26 AM

Thank you for a great article that captured the "feel" of Bakersfield that is truly hard to describe. We have never been considered a destination town, and our valley is not pretty (unless you love the stretches of farmland and oilfields - which we natives appreciate). However, our people, and our unique mix of cultures, give us a homey, friendly appeal. And the Basque food is one of our best assets. I do have one correction - that is not tennis court that is connected to the Noriega Hotel. That is a bonafide handball court, complete with stadium seating. This Basque sport is also called pilota or pelota. Thanks again for a great article.

Posted by Molly on April 22,2012 | 05:34 PM

Bottom line: If you want to eat family style with strangers (always a treat), then you can't beat Noriega's......if you want to dine American style, go to Woolgrowers...... Another bonus @ Noriega's: you can get a Moscow Mule cocktail (in a copper mug) there....not so @ Woolgrowers.

Posted by Craig Holland on April 9,2012 | 05:51 PM

You should wangle an invitation to the annual Bakersfield Basque picnic...where the families get together en mass to celebrate their Basque heritage.

Posted by Liz Holtschneider on April 6,2012 | 11:02 AM

Basque Bakersfield in the news!

Posted by Nancy Dunn on March 31,2012 | 02:39 PM

When I came upon this short article I knew almost nothing about Bakersfield, California,or American Basque cuisine. Having finished reading the article I'm just a little better informed. Regardless - I seriously loved the way this was written. In addition to the several smile educing phrases (like` grail among cocktailians'), this article includes the best sentence I have read in a long time: "I tend to pass through maybe three or four times a year, and over the last couple of decades I have struck up conversations with ranchers and artists and retired schoolteachers, construction guys and roustabouts, couples on the snowbird circuit, 9-year-old boys sulking because their parents wouldn’t let them at the flasks of rough wine included in the price of their dinners, and an Elko farm-equipment man who carried in his wallet a creased photograph of what he said was his mother sunbathing topless in Biarritz in the months before World War II." The sentence, for me, seemed to exceptionally demonstrate the author's (Jonathan Gold) vernacular appreciation for, and the Basque cuisine tendency towards, heartiness over refinement. That was the best sentence I have come across in a long time. Kudos to Mr. Gold.

Posted by Paul Grant (follower of Basho) on March 31,2012 | 04:42 AM

Thank you very much, Mr. Gold for your wonderful piece. As a Basque-American who lives in Bakersfield and worked in these restaurants, it is very humbling to have them appreciated in such a way. I think I speak for all Basques in Bakersfield, in saying "Thank you" and we hope you continue to enjoy your visits. Also, those who have not been able to make the visit yet, we look forward to welcoming you to Basque food. AUPA!

Posted by Andres on March 29,2012 | 12:02 AM

I've been 're-routed' from Bake since graduation from HS, but my Mom & Sister's fam still lives there, so our whole family meets up once in awhile. The very FIRST thing we do is head for Woolgrowers! I still see some of my old friends there periodically, especially during the Holidays, since it was always THE place to see everyone. I still don't understand how it didn't catch on in the rest of the U.S. and miss the food terribly. Sometimes we've come across a 'Basque' restaurant, but the food is more typically Spanish Basque...a whole different 'animal'!! Viva la Bakersfield Basque!!

Posted by Susie Folks Thompson on March 28,2012 | 11:25 AM

As a homesick native of Bakersfield, CA, this article made me unbelievably happy for the day. The ox-tail soup, the cuts of lamb, and the over boiled spaghetti reminded me of how much I love my home. I would like to make one correction: at the end of the article, Gold cites the tennis court, only it's not tennis, it's Pelota - which is more similar to racket ball than it is to tennis. Pelota has it's roots in Greek sporting and has a sorted history in the United States due to gambling laws. I think I'll go make myself a Picon Punch now, a drink I have enjoyed on more then one occasion with my family.

Posted by Jennifer on March 26,2012 | 09:35 PM




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