Basque — the Pyrenees Cafe on Sumner Street serves Basque cuisine, from the Basque Country straddling northern Spain and southwestern France. It opened around 1901 as a boarding house for Basque immigrants, and Bakersfield actually has the largest collection of Basque restaurants in the US.
The signature is the family-style "set-up" — soup, beans, cottage cheese, salsa, bread — followed by entrees like garlic fried chicken and oxtail stew. Guy Fieri called that chicken outstanding on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
If you're ever there, the Basque cottage cheese is the sleeper hit — a savory garlic mix with carrots and cucumbers that people rave about.
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