Casa Cámara

Gelatin, oil and the day’s fish

Hake kokotxas come to the pass by feel, their gelatin coaxed into pil-pil or green sauce before Alberto Salinas, Chef at Casa Cámara in Pasai Donibane, lets the plate leave the kitchen. His station sits inside a house that has treated the Basque coast as its larder since 1884, in a 17th-century mansion at the entrance to the port. The founding name belongs to Pablo Cámara, and the restaurant remains with the Cámara family through four generations, a lineage expressed less as nostalgia than as repetition: fish, shellfish, vegetables, oil, heat.

Salinas works in a register that gives the product little cover. The cooking is traditional, but not passive. Salted Cantabrian anchovies need a clean marine edge; pastel de cabrarroca needs rockfish savor held in shape; txangurro donostiarra asks the kitchen to keep crab within a Basque form without burying it. His known signature, helado artesano al armagnac, closes the meal in another key, with ice cream carrying the aromatic depth of armagnac after a table governed largely by the sea. Casa Cámara holds 1 Sol Repsol for 2025, recognition attached to this house and its current work.

A kitchen built around proximity

The method begins before the pan. Under Salinas, Casa Cámara draws from seasonal produce, quality as the first filter, and local supply when possible: the Pasaia fish market, nearby vegetables, Navarra vegetables and Navarrese oil. That sourcing is part of the technique. A kokotxa without gelatin gives the cook little to emulsify; a crab without sweetness gives txangurro little reason to exist.

The à la carte menu keeps to established coastal forms. Baked crab, lobster and hake kokotxas sit beside fish soup, salpicón and piquillo peppers stuffed with squid in ink, each dish asking for a different handling of richness, brine and heat. Lobster may arrive whole or worked into alubias con langosta, with white beans, onions and a brothy stock carrying the shellfish. Sole meunière extends the discipline beyond the local canon, but the logic remains fish and sauce, timing and restraint. The wine program supports that work without calling too much attention to itself, with whites such as Terras Gauda Albariño fitting the shellfish line.

The room faces the boats

The dining room looks toward the estuary, with sea-facing windows and boats moving in and out of the port while the pass keeps its rhythm. A live lobster aquarium sits within the room, not as theatre alone but as part of the house’s seafood practice, a visible reminder that much of the cooking depends on timing after the product arrives.

The approach through Pasai Donibane keeps the place close to its materials. Cobbled streets, warehouses, fishing vessels and cargo ships belong to the same view as the table. Inside, the room stays conversational, historic rather than staged, with the comfort of a family house that has not rushed to remake itself for each new fashion. The plates do the same. Crab stays crab. Kokotxas keep their gelatin. Donibane 79 has a sea-facing dining room.