Star Hotel

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, thousands of Basque people left the Pyrenees between Spain and France and came to the American West, many of them to herd sheep across the vast open ranges of Nevada. The work was solitary and hard, months alone in the mountains with the flocks, and the towns had few places that felt like home.

The Basque hotel, or ostatua, filled that gap. A man named Pete Jauregui opened the Star Hotel in 1910 to give herders a comfortable place to stay between grazing seasons, with rooms upstairs and a big table downstairs where everyone ate together. It was a boardinghouse, a bank, a mailbox, an employment office, and a family all at once.

The Star has stayed in Basque hands ever since, and by long tradition the original rooms upstairs are still kept for Basque sheepherders who pass through. Few institutions carry that thread of an immigrant community's history so directly into the present.

Elko grew up as a railroad, ranching, and mining town, and its Basque community became one of the strongest in the country. The town is well known for its Basque heritage, celebrated each summer at the National Basque Festival with dancing, weight-lifting and wood-chopping contests, and a great deal of food and Picon Punch.

The Star is one of a small handful of historic Basque restaurants that keep the old boardinghouse dining tradition alive, and Elko treats them as civic treasures. Eating here connects you to that living culture, not a museum version of it.

The surrounding country, high sagebrush basins ringed by the Ruby Mountains and the Independence Range, is exactly the land those herders worked, which makes the setting part of the story.

Meals at the Star are served family-style, the way they always have been: you sit at long tables, often alongside strangers, and the food keeps coming in courses meant to satisfy people who worked all day outdoors. Soup, beans, bread, salad, and a hearty main are the rhythm, generous and unpretentious.

The drink to know is the Picon Punch, a bittersweet mix built on a bitter orange aperitif with brandy, a little sweetness, and soda, garnished with a lemon twist. It came west with the Basques and became so tied to Nevada that many people consider it the state's signature cocktail. It is smoother and stronger than it looks.

The whole experience is loud, warm, and welcoming, a bar up front and a full dining room in back, the kind of place where a meal turns into an evening.

The Basque hotels were once common across the sheep country of Nevada, Idaho, and California, but as the herding era faded and the immigrant generation aged, most of them closed. A meal at the Star is a chance to sit inside one of the few that made it, still run by the same community that built it.

That endurance is exactly what makes it worth a detour. Roadside America is full of places that imitate history; this is the real thing, a working restaurant that never stopped being what it was, feeding travelers and locals the same food at the same tables for well over a hundred years.

Elko sits in high desert that runs hot in summer and cold and snowy in winter, and the Star is a fine anchor in any season, a warm room and a hearty meal at the end of a long drive across the Great Basin, whichever direction you came from.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.