This is not your run-of-the-mill meal gastronomic experience by a couple of light-years. Start with the place. In the middle of the center of the heart of nowhere in north Portugal. If you, like me, are old enough to have traveled using Michelin or Rand McNally foldable paper maps, you would NEVER get there. Is that a minus? No, is the plusiest of the pluses. Not a single uninformed person will get there. Continue with the scenery. Wow! I’m not sure you get me. WOW. This is all you have ever been told about the Douro. Steep valley, river at the bottom, vineyards N, S, E and W. BTW Douro in Portuguese means literally “of the gold” or rather, golden. Go there if you don’t trust me. Then the restaurant (we haven’t stayed at the hotel, much to our chagrin). It has 4 (as in 1, 2, 3 and 4) tables in a room perched onto the steep valley looking at the above-described scenery. Then, the service. Oh boy! Portuguese courtesy must rank in 0th place among the European. They are so, so courteous, that you get embarrassed. CdoA’s team is not different, with the added plus that they know individually each olive that went into their oil and each individual grape that went into their wines (provided they come from the Douro region, of course). No attention to detail is spared, no explanation is withheld, no opportunity to make you enjoy your meal is lost. All that with a smile on their face, of the genuine kind. Which leads us to the cooking. They have 3 set menus and a à-la-carte menu that allows you to pick from the 3 menus. We had burrata made with Portuguese milk and a hint of black truffles and a light green salad, then beef ribs served out of the bone, to the desired point (medium rare, no doubt) with hollowed roasted potatoes with house olive oil in the hollow (I mean olive made In the house with the property’s olives) and small green peppers. When asked about the heat of the peppers the answer was “well… sometimes they are hot, sometimes not”. If you want the predictable, stay at home. Then you have the wines. They have a respectable cross section of Portuguese wines, slanted towards the Douro region (surprising, isn’t it?). It was a very special date for us, so we splurged with a Vale do Meão 2013 (Jesus! that was a decade ago). Levitation category. Then dessert made of natas (fresh cream) ice-cream with something or other that my memory became incapacitated to hold, paired with a 20-year Moscatel do Douro (not to be confused with Moscatel de Setubal unless you want to start WW III). Then coffee and back into your car going downhill listening to the Beatles’ Long and Winding Road till you reach the Douro margin. Adam and Eve were less sorry leaving the Eden than we were going down the road last Friday.
Perfect
39 Reviews