Basque Restaurants in the United States
Updated August 2025
The Basques are known for their amazing food. To read about how Basque family style restaurants got started in the United States, see below.
Here is our list of the restaurants in different regions of the U.S.
Basque restaurants in Los Angeles area – Southern California
Basque restaurants in San Francisco Bay Area – Northern California
Basque restaurants in Oregon and Washington
Basque Restaurants in New York and East Coast
HISTORY OF TRADITIONAL BASQUE FAMILY-STYLE RESTAURANTS
The traditional family-style restaurants that dominated the American West’s Basque restaurant scene for many years developed from Basque boardinghouses, which mostly housed single young men who had immigrated from the Basque region of Spain and France.
These places served as social hubs, where Basque immigrants could gather, speak their native language and enjoy familiar food and company. The food for the boarders was served on big plates at long tables, and often, former boarders and friends joined the dinner table on weekends. Eventually, owners of these hotels realized they could do business by catering to the public and the Basque family-style restaurant was born.
If you wanted to find the location of the first Basque restaurants in the U.S., you simply had to find the train station in the towns where Basques immigrated. That’s because the restaurants originated from the boardinghouses or “hotels” that catered to the young Basque men who came to the American West to herd sheep. And since these men did not speak English, the best location was right next to the train stations where they got off after traveling west from New York.
In California, the Basque boardinghouses were located in Fresno, Bakersfield, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Los Banos, Stockton and Susanville among others. In Idaho they were in Boise, Shoshone, Mountain Home and Gooding. In Nevada, the boardinghouses were in Elko, Reno, Winnemucca, Gardnerville, Battle Mountain and Ely.
These hotels and restaurants thrived as immigration from the Basque Country continued heavily from the 1880s through the early 1960s. But as immigration from the Basque Country ceased, and the immigrants married and moved out, the boardinghouses slowly went out of business, as did their restaurants.
Only a few of the older family-style restaurants that were formerly hotels remain. They include Centro Basco in Chino, Calif., the Pyrenees in Bakersfield,Calif., Woolgrowers in Los Banos, Calif., the Martin Hotel in Winnemucca, Nev., the Star Hotel in Elko, Nevada and Louis Basque Corner in Reno, Nev.
CENTRO BASCO
13432 Central Ave.
Chino, California 91710
(909) 628-9014
STAR HOTEL
246 Silver St. (at Third St.)
Elko, Nevada 89801
(775) 738-9925
Former owner of Des Alpes Restaurant in San Francisco Tells of Life in the Basque Boardinghouses
Video of some of the old Basque places that are still in existence
READ SOME OF OUR STORIES ABOUT BASQUE RESTAURANTS
Some of the Top 100 Restaurants in the World are Basque
Donate
