EBG Rating: 8.5/10

Choice/Quality of Drinks:
❤️❤️❤️
Wines and sherries with basic lagers.

Style/Décor:
❤️❤️❤️❤️
One room bodega on a backstreet with a bar counter facing the entrance. The bar contains all the ingredients for preparing the food, with open tins, cheese and sausages. The bar is plainly furnished with basic tables, stools and upturned barrels in saloon style, rustic wood fittings and tinted glass windows at the front.

Atmosphere/Character:
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Local life, rhythms and etiquette to observe, from conversations with regulars, inundations of blue collar works at lunchtimes suffused with occasional visitors and the odd tourist. Social, simple, uncomplicated, highly unpretentious. Sometimes spilling out into the alley.

Amenities/Events:
❤️❤️❤️
Food, takeaway, weighing scales (?)

Value For Money:
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Superbly honest and affordable offerings both for drinks and food that meet a good standard too.

Description:
Set in a narrow side alley in the heart of Casco Viejo, Joserra is the type of business that could only be where it is, yet in this day and age seems an unlikely find.

One of the most straightforward, unpretentious and honest businesses you’re likely to find. A solidly working class bodega that focuses on affordable booze and freshly made sandwiches. A drink and a sandwich as of 2025 did not push above 5 euros.

It’s a one room boozer in traditional style, something of a saloon with rustic fittings and patterned tinted glass windows at the front.

You’ll find everyone here from workers in overalls grabbing a lunchtime snack to the occasional tourist who has found out about the place on social media.

Service is typically Basque – straightforward and no-nonsense.

In 2024 they celebrated their centenary, over 100 years of providing something so simple that meets the needs of residents and visitors alike.

Original bodega rules permitted the owner to sell wine but not to be consumed with food like a tavern, and he was fined for trying. However, they allowed him to apply for a tavern license and as you’ll notice, the application was not refused.

Joserra was the owners son, and family ownership was retained by his son Imanol until the early 2000s after which it has been leased before being taken on by José Garcia, the husband of Imanol’s daughter. He is one part of a double act who serve customers throughout the day.

For its rare working class format in the heart of a popular area where such places are thinning out, it offers something you will not easily find elsewhere. In its true simplicity and honesty there is an authenticity, a defiance, a stubbornness that is endearing and somewhere where it is genuinely difficult to haul yourself away from without staying for a 2nd or 3rd drink.

(Added November 2025)