Location: Aldeamento da Prainha, Alvor 8500, Portugal

Web site: http://www.canicorestaurante.com/

Telephone number: +351 282 458 503

Date of visit: June 2010

Approx. cost per head: £60

Comments on wine list/beer: broad wine list but imports rather overpriced

Media link:

Review:

Canico

Canico is cool. But that isn’t much of a review, so to expand, you reach this bar/restaurant/music venue either from the beach (which involves a refreshing wade at high tide) or via a cliff top path and lift which disappears inside the cliff itself.

The venue is arranged over three floors all sunk into the sandstone cliff face; it’s impressive to see and the views out over the beach, rocks and sunset are up there with SE Asia. On the middle floor there is a bar where the long serving barman thinks he looks like Michael Douglas. In so much as he has a hook nose and is about the right age, we humoured him; he also made very good Caipirinhas. The bar hosts beach parties several times a year which are apparently huge, but whilst we were there the entertainment was a Portuguese saxophonist who was very good and an Irish guitarist who was rather bad.

Having checked the menu a few days earlier, and booked a table looking out to sea we chose Canico for our last meal of the holiday and were very pleased that we did. Prices are about 20% more than anywhere else we ate in Alvor, but this is justified by the venue, service, and the extra attention to detail paid to the dishes. The fundamentals, i.e. very fresh, beautifully cooked fish and shellfish were the same here as for other places, but everything around the fish was somehow better.

Our meal began with a Gazpacho amuse bouche and the usual selection of traditional Portuguese tapas including octopus, local sheeps milk cheese, grilled sardines, pickled carrots and olives. The bread was homemade and very fresh.

For our main we shared a large red snapper, about a kilo’s worth which is what bumps up the price, snapper was €70 per kilo but there was plenty on the menu for more than that. The menu is transparently arranged to show what is fresh that day and what is available but either not local or frozen; it’s probably the most comprehensive fish, shellfish and mollusc list I have seen, you would have made an enemy of 50 or more species by the time you’d tried the lot.

Our snapper was presented with fresh greens, traditional potatoes (new potatoes which are salted, parboiled then baked with the skin on) which we washed down with a bottle of 2009 Planalto; this is a trustworthy Portuguese dry white made from traditional Portuguese grapes Malvasia Fina, Viosinho and Gouveio in the Douro Valley which is in the north of Portugal.

We managed to time our meal for sunset, and whilst the restaurant was full all night it didn’t ever seem rushed or hectic, just very relaxing, very tasty and very much recommended if you are ever in the south of Portugal Canalco is certainly worth driving to from the more well known resorts in Albufeira and Portimao to the east.

Michael Le Brocq