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The Basque boarding hotels that opened in Elko, Winnemucca, Boise, and Bakersfield starting in the late 1800s were not restaurants in any conventional sense. Basque sheepherders came off the range after months alone in the high desert and needed a place to sleep, eat, and speak their own language again. The hotels gave them that: a bed, a bath, and a seat at a long pine table with whoever else showed up.
The town came to those tables too. You did not order from a menu—you sat down and food arrived, course after course, until the kitchen stopped sending it out. Soup, then salad, then beans, then a stew or a plate of tongue, then a main of lamb, chicken, or steak, bread at all times, and a pitcher of house red wine that made its way around without being asked for. The dishes below follow that meal from the soup course through dessert, the kind of cooking that came out of kitchens like the Star Hotel in Elko and Noriega’s in Bakersfield.
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