Basque Lunch

[honda03842]

Yesterday Ginny and I visited the Elko Museum, a good one, featuring a collection of Will James books and drawings. Part of the exhibit dealt with the local Basque population, certainly the topography is not dissimilar to their native Spain.

As a result we decided to try Elko's best Basque restaurant at the Star Hotel on Silver St. It turns out that this is a famous place that's won all kinds of awards, both nationally and locally.

The interior is not fancy but very welcoming. Tables are family style, you're sitting with strangers, fortunately for us. The gentleman steered us in the right direction.

He suggestted we get one salad and one soup plus split a sandwich. The salad was an immense bowl adequate for a family of four; the soup was a large serving bowl with ladle.

Ginny and I had 7 servings of a marvelous Basque cabbage soup from that bowl, I was not able to identify the spice in the soup but 7 servings speaks for itself. Of course the soup come with a large loaf of an excellent French bread.

Most people ordered a steak sandwich, a real dinner size steak (everyone seemed to order it with the cooked garlic as well) between a great french roll. We choose the Star Melt, roast beef, green and red peppers, onions mushrooms and swiss cheese. It also came with a mountain of made-here shoe string french fries and a cup of excellent beef ajus.

The whole lunch came to under $20 and totally negated the need for dinner. Service was great, the setting comfortable and customers and staff friendly.

We love finding the different and good. We live near Portsmouth, NH, an upscale community with easily 100 restaurants, none are Basque. This was a real treat.

[Lizbeth]

The only time I have been in Elko was on the way home from a trip to Wyoming. We picked up a stray cat that had been abandoned at a gas station. We had to smuggle her into a motel. We named her Elko!

That food sounds wonderful, if we are ever that way again we will try it.

[cpaharley2008]

Norm,
You should start submitting reviews to Frommer and Fodor's travel guide books- you write well or is that very good!!

[honda03842]

Well is correct. 'Well versus Good' is a family joke.

Today we're in Elko as a prep point for the wedding, sadly leaving our little campground with it's cottonwood trees, two streams, nightly campfire and wonderful owners.

Around lunch time we drove by the Star Hotel though the car seemed to skip a beat we continued on to a little Mexican restuarant and a single shredded beef enchilada.

I will say one thing that I've lost with aging is the ability to eat a lot.

One thing we missed out on was the once a month tour of one of the large gold mines. The Carlin area just west of the city of Elko has produced 40,000,000 ounces of gold, multiply that by the price of gold......

[Jo Agrafojo]

Norm and Ginny,

We've been in the Basque country (Spanish side of the Pyranees) a couple of times. We live on the NW Atlantic coast further West than the Basque country. The Basques are well-known for their cooking. The Basque taverns all serve wonderful appetizers (called tapas). Its funny, but both times we were in the Basque country we got lost and ended up on high, itsy-bitsy, narrow, zig-zagging mountain roads - ha! - pulling our little TT. Never seems to happen to us anywhere else (we use our GPS AND Google.maps). We still laugh when we talk about our adventures there (one was the very first day we bought the TT - we bought it in Pamplona, which is located in the Basque country). Spanish cuisine (not Mexican) is very varied - the Basques food is VERY good and the food from our area (Galicia) is very well-known as well (for our seafood and fish, especially)

[john warren]

ah yes food,,,love food adventures. its about 90% of why i travel. the other 10% being the look on my wifes face as she says,"i can't believe you ate that!"lol

to travel is to learn about the local people,,,and to learn about the local people is to eat their food.

[honda03842]

Though it seems I often right about eating out we rarely do it. Though I admit we look for the different. For years we carried a book titled "Road Food" that listed just special places to eat across the country. We always ask the locals, look for lots of cars (better yet if they're not Mercedes or the like), sometimes the Internet, and sometimes Road Food.

The reality is that there are too many good places to eat. One thing we have done since we've RVed is split meals, sometimes I think a sign of age. Regardless we do seem less capable of eating a lot.

As a defense I have lost between 60 and 70 pounds since we began RVing.

[Hazel in Sk]

We split meals too now we are retired. It means less cost of course, but the big reason is being able to enjoy the food instead of getting stuffed!