BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — The Noriega Hotel, an iconic dining destination that served hearty Basque meals for decades and won accolades including the prestigious James Beard Award, has closed permanently.

“The Noriega Hotel will not re-open after the COVID-19 closure,” the restaurant’s Facebook page said Friday. “We appreciate all the people that have dined with us for the last 89 years.”

That message was left by the Elizalde family, which has run the operation since 1931. The former boarding house opened in 1893 and was the oldest of Bakersfield’s Basque restaurants.

Jonathan Gold, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic, wrote multiple times about the meals he enjoyed at Noriega Hotel.

“If you are sitting down at a long, oilcloth-covered table and there is a tin bowl of beans in front of you, a tureen of thin vegetable soup and a bowl of mild tomato salsa, you know you’re at a Basque restaurant even without looking at the maps, the paintings of sheep-protecting dogs and the reservation books in which Echeverria is a more common name than Smith,” Gold wrote in a 2011 article for LA Weekly.

The closing of Noriega marks the end of an era. It was the only Basque restaurant still serving meals family-style, with patrons sitting at long tables and passing dishes as they conversed and tucked into enormous dinners of fried chicken, beef stew or prime rib.

The entrees varied by the day of the week. Regulars knew to show up on Thursdays for garlic fried chicken and spare ribs, while on Saturdays you could count on oxtail stew and fried chicken.

Along with the entrees came plate after plate of salad, pickled tongue, french fries, spaghetti, tomatoes and onions in vinegar, French bread. Dessert — if you had room — was a scoop of ice cream.