Our friend recommended Landa as a nice place to stop for lunch on our drive up to Bilbao from Madrid. Don't do what we did and turn into the hotel lot, which is essentially a field, and then schlepp all the way across the grounds to the restaurant where there is a perfectly good parking lot. Also don't wear your travel clothes (i.e. sweatpants) because most folks are pretty dressed up.
It took us about 10 minutes to figure out that there wasn't a host, so we basically had to pantomime "can we sit at this table?" to the server who was running around outside where, be forewarned, everybody smokes. 10 minutes after that we were greeted and our table cleared, and 10 minutes after that we got water and ordered (no English menu or speakers, so thank you, Google translate!). The food here is excellent.
The three of us (traveling with our good friend J.!) shared the large simple salad, salmon brioche (one of us loved it; the other one doesn't care for salmon, so no comment), the red pepper omelet, and the famous morcilla with runny eggs. Oh and bread--mmmmmmmm, their bread is so goooood. The morcilla dish was fine, but we didn't think it was anything crazy special. The red pepper omelet was definitely our favorite dish of the meal (and possibly of the trip so far). It had a ton of ham in it and was super savory with tomato. Highly recommend.
Service was terrible, but no surprise there, so we're not taking that into account. A happy four stars for the food and the beautiful fairy-tale castle location. read more