Each winter the valley behind San Sebastián opens its barrel rooms, and a single shouted word sends everyone scrambling to catch cider straight from the cask. The sidrería is not a restaurant — it is a season, a ritual, and the most Basque night you can have.
There is a moment in every cider-house evening when a man at the far end of the barrel hall cups his hands and shouts a single word — 'Txotx!' — and the whole room rises and walks toward him, glass in hand. He pulls a small wooden peg from the side of an enormous chestnut cask and a thin, hissing jet of cider arcs out under its own pressure. You catch a couple of fingers' worth in your tilted glass, drink it down while it is still alive with bubbles, and walk back to your table until the next call. This is txotx, and it is the heartbeat of Basque cider culture.
The custom belongs to the valley of Astigarraga, just a few kilometres inland from the city, where the hills are planted with the sharp, low-tannin apples that make sagardoa — Basque cider, dry and still and faintly wild, nothing like the sweet fizzy stuff sold elsewhere. From roughly January to April the sidrerías throw open their cask rooms for the txotx season, and the whole region drives out to eat, drink and shout the word into the rafters.
Sidrería Petritegi is one of the great names, a family cider house going back generations on the slopes above Astigarraga, where you eat standing and seated in equal measure and the casks line the walls like a cathedral's columns. The ritual here is pure: you pay one price, the cider is effectively unlimited from the barrel, and the only question is how many times you can answer the call of txotx before the meal ends.
The menu, crucially, never changes, because it is not really a menu — it is the fixed liturgy of the sidrería. A tortilla of salt cod to start, then a thick slab of cod fried with green peppers and onions, then a colossal txuleta — a bone-in, dry-aged beef chop seared over coals and carved at the table — and to finish, a wedge of hard sheep's cheese with quince paste and walnuts. You eat the same thing at every cider house in the valley, and that sameness is the point: the food is the frame, the cider and the company are the picture.
A little further out, in the riverside hamlet of Aginaga, Sidrería Aginaga carries the same tradition with a local, unfussed feel — the same casks, the same shouted word, the same unchanging plates, in a room full of Basque families and friends rather than visitors. It is the version of the ritual that reminds you this was never built for tourists; it is simply how the valley has eaten and drunk for as long as anyone remembers.
Going as a local would means a few small courtesies. Drink the cider in small amounts and often, rather than filling a glass and nursing it — the whole design of txotx is freshness, and a glass left to stand goes flat and dull. Pour from height, aiming the jet at the inner wall of the tilted glass to wake up the bubbles. And do not expect to sit all night; the rhythm of standing, catching, drinking and returning is the entire experience, and it is meant to be communal and a little chaotic.
If you cannot make it out to the valley, or you come outside the txotx months, the tradition still echoes in the city. Old-guard Parte Vieja kitchens like Bodegón Alejandro keep the cider-house classics — the cod, the txuleta — on the menu year-round, and a modern room like Casa Urola will pour you a good bottle of sagardoa with serious cooking. But the real thing happens out among the apple trees, glass tilted, waiting for someone to shout the word.
