Txikito

Chelsea's Basque Anchor, Seventeen Years On

When Txikito opened on Ninth Avenue in 2008, the broader Spanish dining conversation in New York was dominated by a handful of marquee names and the lingering prestige of molecular gastronomy arriving from Catalonia. Basque cooking, pintxos bars, briny conservas, simple but precise fish preparations, occupied a quieter corner of that conversation. Txikito helped push it into a more central position, and the restaurant has held that ground through two subsequent decades of dining-trend churn.

The pandemic hiatus that closed so many Chelsea institutions proved, in this case, to have a clarifying effect. When Txikito reopened in 2023 with a refreshed look and renewed creative energy, it returned not as a heritage act replaying old moves but as a kitchen with something to prove. The Opinionated About Dining ranking tells the directional story clearly: Recommended in 2023 on its return, climbing to #221 in 2024, and reaching #126 in the Casual North America list by 2025. That kind of upward movement in a competitive field is a signal worth reading.

What the Regulars Know

The clientele that has cycled through Txikito over seventeen years has developed the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from repeated visits. These are not diners who need the menu explained. They know which dishes reward a second look, which combinations are worth ordering alongside rather than instead of each other, and how the room settles into its rhythm after the first hour of service.

Pintxos and small plates that anchor the menu sit across two registers. The familiar end, jamón, anchovies, croquetas, functions as the entry point, but the kitchen's better argument lies in the less obvious choices. The boquerones, for instance, read on the menu as a direct anchovy preparation, which is precisely what makes the discovery of Vietnamese rau ram concealed inside such an effective moment. The herb's citrusy, minty sharpness reframes what seemed like a conservative dish. This is the kitchen's method: classical Basque as the starting position, then a precise lateral move that neither undermines the original nor announces itself too loudly.

Suckling pig with crisp skin and octopus carpaccio cut thin enough to turn translucent sit in the same tier as the boquerones, dishes that reward attention rather than demanding it. The cooking originates on the Bay of Biscay but follows threads elsewhere without apology, in the way that Basque culinary culture, historically one of the most curious and outward-looking in Europe, has always done.

What keeps regulars returning is something harder to quantify than any single dish: the sense that the kitchen is engaged with its own work. Alex Raij and Eder Montero have been running this room for nearly two decades, and the cooking carries the confidence of people who are not trying to prove a concept but have long since moved on to refining it.

Where Txikito Sits in New York's Spanish Dining Scene

New York's Spanish restaurant tier is narrower than the city's French or Japanese offerings, but it has genuine depth at the leading. Casa Mono and Bar Jamón represents the Batali-era legacy of Spanish small plates in the Gramercy area. El Quinto Pino functions as a more compact, bar-forward expression of similar territory. Leña at Mercado Little Spain operates at a larger, more production-scaled level on the Hudson Yards side of the borough.

Txikito occupies a different position: neighbourhood-sized, independently operated, and focused on a specifically Basque frame rather than a pan-Spanish one. The Opinionated About Dining recognition places it in a competitive set of casual-format restaurants that earn sustained critical attention without the infrastructure of a large hospitality group behind them. For context, that same list includes operators that regularly outperform their category in cities across North America. A jump of 95 ranking positions in two years is not incremental drift, it reflects a kitchen operating with purpose.

The comparison with high-format Spanish cooking elsewhere in the world is also instructive. ZURRIOLA in Tokyo and Arco by Paco Pérez in Gdańsk represent the export version of Spanish fine dining, carrying Basque and Catalan techniques into foreign markets with significant investment and formality. Txikito is the opposite of that model: rooted, casual, and more concerned with nightly repetition done well than with defining a category.

The Chelsea Address and What It Means

Ninth Avenue in Chelsea has a different dining character than the blocks closer to the High Line or the gallery district. It has historically attracted the kind of neighbourhood restaurants that serve a mixed crowd of locals and deliberate destination diners, without relying on foot traffic from tourists. Txikito fits that pattern.

Evening hours run Monday through Thursday and Sunday from 5 to 10 pm, with Friday and Saturday service extending to 10:30 pm. There is no lunch service, which concentrates the kitchen's energy into a single daily window and maintains the dinner-focused character that Basque pintxos culture, at its more serious end, tends to favour.

For readers building out a New York dining itinerary that goes beyond the highest-format options, the comparison set matters. The city's $$$$ tier, Le Bernardin, Atomix, operates in a different register entirely, where tasting menus and prix-fixe structures define the experience. Txikito sits in the casual tier deliberately, which is where the Opinionated About Dining list places it and where its format makes the most sense. You order what you want, in the order you want it, and the meal takes its shape from that rather than from a kitchen-dictated sequence.

Planning Your Visit

Txikito is at 240 9th Ave, Chelsea, Manhattan. Service runs nightly from 5 pm, with late closing on weekends. The restaurant has been operating since 2008, with the current iteration dating from its 2023 reopening. For broader New York dining, drinking, and hotel context, see our full New York City restaurants guide, hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide. For comparable Spanish kitchens across the US, Emeril's in New Orleans, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Alinea in Chicago, The French Laundry in Napa, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, and Providence in Los Angeles represent the broader range of serious American dining contexts in which Txikito's casual-format ambition can be usefully measured.