After La Concha

The person you are meeting is late, although not late enough to require an apology. They arrive wearing sunglasses and carrying the vague confidence of someone who has already had breakfast. This turns out not to be entirely true.

Coffee is ordered. A slice of tortilla is cut behind the bar and divided without discussion. There is bread with tomato, jamón laid in soft folds across a white plate and the familiar promise that this will be all, because lunch is not far away and the day is supposed to contain other things.

Outside, the city has already moved into summer. Shopkeepers stand beneath their awnings. Delivery vans ease through streets that seem too narrow to have permitted them. The morning shade remains cool between the buildings, but beyond them La Concha is bright, the water catching the sun and the beach beginning to fill from the promenade down. There was talk of walking around Urgull before lunch. It is mentioned once, without conviction, and then allowed to disappear.

San Sebastián is very good at encouraging you to abandon your plans.

By the time you reach the restaurant above the beach, your companion has remembered somebody who ate there several summers ago and still talks about the fish. This is offered as reassurance, although the view has already settled the matter. The windows are open across the bay, the island rests in the water and a bottle has appeared in an ice bucket before either of you has properly considered what to order.

Lunch takes the shape these lunches do. Tomatoes with olive oil and salt. Peppers dark from the grill. Fish cooked whole and placed between you, requiring the small cooperation of passing the plate back and forth, removing a bone, taking the better piece and pretending not to have noticed. The conversation wanders. People on the beach become temporary subjects of interest. A man erects an umbrella against a breeze that has other ideas. Children race repeatedly into the water and retreat from it screaming. Farther out, swimmers move towards Santa Clara with the steady purpose that lunch has removed from everyone at the table.

By the time you leave, the tide has shifted and the beach has changed shape. Shoes are carried across the sand. Towels are found, somehow, and the water is approached with the false courage people adopt when they know it is going to be cold.

It is cold.

A few steps farther and it no longer matters. The city rearranges itself from the water: pale buildings around the curve of the bay, green hills behind them and the promenade holding everything in place. The sounds from the beach soften. For several minutes, there is nowhere else to be and nothing waiting to be done.

Later, when the sun has begun its slow descent towards Igueldo, your companion returns from the promenade with two ice creams, having selected both flavours without consultation. One is better than the other. This is discovered quickly and corrected through theft.

The light over La Concha has lost the white glare of noon. It lies warmer across the façades now, catching windows and balconies, settling over the sand. People begin gathering towels without displaying any real intention of leaving. A final swim is proposed, rejected and then taken anyway. There is still sand on your feet when the question of the evening arises. Someone ought to go back and change. This is obvious. It is also inconvenient, and the Old Town is close enough for inconvenience to win.

The first bar is chosen because there is space near the door. The first beer is chosen because it is cold. It has enough bitterness to cut through the salt left by the sea, and the glass clouds in the warmth of the room as your companion studies the counter with the concentration previously withheld from every other decision that day.

Jamón arrives first. It needs nothing from either of you except to be eaten before somebody orders something else. The fat has softened at room temperature and the slices disappear almost as soon as the plate reaches the bar. The croquetas follow because your companion has seen them being carried past.

They arrive in no useful quantity. There are too many if neither of you is hungry and not nearly enough once the first has been opened. The shell breaks beneath the fork and the centre gives way. One of you burns a finger. Another plate is ordered to resolve the shortage.

From there, the evening develops its own momentum. The next place is around the corner, according to somebody standing nearby. He gives directions with a confidence unsupported by the eventual result, but the wrong turn produces another bar and therefore cannot be considered a failure.

There is a Gilda somewhere along the way, sharp with anchovy, olive and guindilla, followed by tortilla from a pan that has only just arrived at the counter. A small glass of txakoli is poured. Then another beer, darker and more assertive than the first, chosen by your companion on the grounds that the night now requires stronger opinions.

The Old Town closes around the evening. Streets that seemed quiet in the morning are full of voices and movement. People lean against stone walls with glasses in their hands. Plates pass over shoulders. Napkins gather beneath the bars. Every few minutes a doorway releases someone into the street while drawing somebody else inside.

There had been a suggestion of dinner, meaning chairs, a reservation and perhaps the continued use of a single table. Neither of you mentions it again. Dinner has already been happening for several hours; it has simply declined to remain in one room. Your companion claims to know where the cheesecake is. For once, the directions are correct.

It arrives dark across the top, soft in the centre and without the decoration that would only delay matters. One slice is placed between you. Two forks begin politely from opposite sides before abandoning any pretense of an equitable border. A second slice is ordered, ostensibly because the first was not large enough to judge properly.

When you return to the street, the night is warm and the Old Town is still busy. There is talk of one more drink, although both of you understand how unreliable the phrase has become. Instead, you begin walking towards the bay with no urgency to arrive.

La Concha is almost empty now. The water is black beyond the lights of the promenade, and the beach that governed the afternoon has withdrawn into the dark. Your clothes still carry a little salt. Sand remains somewhere it should not. The plans made that morning have been comprehensively ignored.

Your companion says it was a good day, with the satisfaction of someone willing to accept partial responsibility for it.

San Sebastián often returns this way: not as a list of celebrated restaurants or the memory of a single extraordinary plate, but as a day that loosened as it went along. Tortilla taken from somebody else’s breakfast. Lunch extended by the view. An unnecessary final swim. Jamón eaten standing at the bar, croquetas ordered twice and burnt cheesecake after dinner had already happened in four different places.

The pleasure lies in the accumulation—and in how easily a few of those flavours can bring the rest of the day back.

For travellers who would like to carry something of San Sebastián beyond the bay, Velair Privé creates bespoke inflight menus inspired by its bars, its tables and the long summer evenings that begin after La Concha.