Restaurante Zapirain

A Basque seafood restaurant with excellent fish offering. The hostess was very friendly and boisterous. We ordered the turbot which was delicious.

Good, honest food. Do expect anything too complex. The menu is fish oriented. Fish soup and home made foie gras was really delicious. Hake in green souce was decent. I am not particularly fan of hake, it does not have any flavor in my opinion. Red mullet was better. Crème caramel was final.

My dear friend from Bilbao brought me to Zapirain to celebrate my birthday. It was a memorable dining experience. The food was a real “ capolavoro” , the service was impeccable and the restaurant itself is very elegant and so cozy at the same time. It was a fantastic taste experience and good for the palate, good for the heart good for the soul

Fish was quite tasty and service was good. But must say it was a bit overpriced. But acceptable. By the way, the dress code is smart casual to semi formal.

Fine and delicate kitchen. Definitely one of the best fish restaurants in Bilbao area. Not touristic at all and a very relaxed atmosphere. Service was excellent. The waitress was warm-hearted and very kind. If I ever travel to Bilbao again, I will unquestionably come back.

Visited with local partner and had good dinner. Nice dish and wine.

This restaurant was a terrible experience for us. I ordered a soup (it was really a cream, but it was very good, 44 euros), and a bottle of wine. There were ONLY 5 tables with people eating, and the owner of the restaurant told us that we had to order more food because she couldn't have a restaurant open for people to order only soup (44 euros). The owner of the restaurant was claiming that if we do not have enough appetite then we should go to a bar and order tapas. She was very rude and unfriendly. I do not recommend this place if you are not going to order several dishes so that you do not have a bad time. It was a bad experience for us.

I´ve never had a bad experience in Bilbao - but this was just dreadful. AVOID. We had a reservation for 9pm, the curtains were shut and the door was locked. So my colleague rang the doorbell at 9:01pm. The owner opened the door shouting at us, asking if we were going to make a scene for not being open yet - at this point we hadn´t said more than "hello". We tried to explain that we had only rang the door because at other places you lose your reservation if you are running late, that had been our concern. She kept on yelling and saying that it was rude to want to ring the door before 9pm and that one is allowed in whenever she decides to open the door. - At this point we would have left, but it was a Saturday evening and we were a party of 7, finding a different restaurant would have been impossible. I asked her to lower her voice and stop yelling at us since we hadn´t complained about anything nor had we been disrespectful, but that hit deaf ears. We had booked the table because we were going to have dinner with important business partners and the company I work for used to be a good client here (we will never book a table here again). They sat us next to the kitchen and the toilet. Then they took the orders of everyone that arrived after us and were finally allowed to order food at 9:42. We got to order drinks before that only because we requested it from the waitress. We said we wouldn´t have starters as we had late lunch - the owner got mad again and told us that in that case we shouldn´t have come to her place for dinner. After ordering she informed us she would let us wait as long as if we had ordered a starter (?!?). We couldn´t really complain much as we didn´t want to cause a scene in front of our guests. 4 people ordered individual dishes and 3 a fish which was actually recommended for 5 people. The fish arrived first - and got put on individual plates, we requested 2 smaller tasting portions for our guests (also to not have them sitting there without food). The owner said no, they should wait for their own dish and they can then serve themselves. Totally rude. Our guests had brought a bottle of wine which they wanted to share - I asked if we could drink it paying a corkage fee (I would have been happy to match the price of one their wine bottles for this, I just wanted to make our guests happy), which is something totally normal at any other upscale restaurant. This was again taken as an offense. The food was pretty decent. The owner and waitress are nightmare. Avoid at all costs, there are so many other great places to eat at in Bilbao.