The Pairing

The short version is, I’m pissed at Kit.

The long version is, we’re on a pintxos crawl through glorious, sun-soaked San Sebastián, and everything is sumptuous and salty and soaked in oil and piled atop the most delectable morsels of crusty bread, and Kit looks happy, and I’m pissed.

I’ve read the San Sebastián portion of World Travel five times, so I know exactly what Bourdain said about this place. He wrote that it might be the greatest culinary destination in Europe, and that he imagined himself living a perfect life here. I get it—I feel it in every corner of this city, every sand-dusted tile and fuzzy green stone, every brick in every Gothic arch, whiffs of saffron and clove and guindilla at every overstuffed pintxos bar.

We’ve arrived on the last day of Semana Grande, the city’s end-of-summer festival, and the streets are fucking alive. Street performers balance on milk jugs with puppets on their hands, cooks under tents pound balls of dough into pans, giant-headed mascots chase screaming children through the squares. The chaos is incandescent and overwhelming and viscerally of its own place, like a cava waterboarding.