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

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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

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Name of restaurant or pub: Restaurante Atlantida

Location: Praia 3 Irmaos, Alvor, Portugal

Web site: no site

Telephone number: 0035 282 459 647

Date of visit: June 2010

Approx. cost per head: £40

Comments on wine list/beer: local wines and beers

Media link:

Review:

Restaurante Atlantida, Alvor, Portugal

Back in the 90’s when the Canadian dollar was weaker than today and Vancouver had fewer crack gangs, a group of us visited Whistler several winters on the trot. The snow was deep and the beer flowed freely and cheaply, but the thing which most excited the adolescent in me was that for the equivalent of about six quid you could order a ‘surf and turf’ in the resort’s steakhouse.

In the UK for at least twice the price you would be presented with half a dozen pieces of frozen scampi substitute and some tough-as-old-boots beef all nuked by a grumbling student in Ugg boots… you might also be in a Wetherspoons pub.

In Whistler in 1999 however you would have been served a whole pacific lobster tail and a perfectly cooked Canadian beef fillet steak with melted butter, grilled mushrooms and fries all served with a smile and an ‘Ey’. It was good, so good in fact that I ate this most nights for nearly two weeks with startlingly conspicuous consequences.

It was then, after several days of eating the most amazing barbequed fresh fish that I craved cow and opted to try the surf and turf at Restaurante Atlantida on the beach in Alvor. After the obligatory olives, bread, butter and cheese which we later discovered were not obligatory at all, the other half tucked into a perfectly cooked rock bass steak with wilted greens whilst I enjoyed a good cut of fillet topped with large and very fresh langoustines and some rosemary potatoes. The ingredients could be counted on one hand, all were very fresh, seasoned and cooked to perfection. Delicious. We paired with the local dry white which like the rest of Portugal’s wine has benefitted from state investment over the past decade.

The consensus with fish in the Algarve seems to be to gut and scale the animal then deeply score along the spine on the broad sides, roll in sea salt and drizzle with a mixture of olive oil and lemon juice as required whilst barbequing over charcoal. The real secret is of course the quality and freshness of the wild Atlantic catch, and it’s this which is the hard thing to copy at home.

Atlantida is a good place to be with seating inside and out and a spectacular view especially at sunset. The staff are friendly, and cater for locals and tourists with equal courtesy, they even let me watch the England group game during the day.

The Alvor area of the coast has several good places to eat which I’ll review as well, but this restaurant comfortably makes the top three of the five we tried during our stay.

Michael Le Brocq

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