Food · COMPORTA, PORTUGAL
Where to eat in the Alentejo when the youngest is two and the menu is in Portuguese
An olive-shaded courtyard, a tasting menu that lasts three hours, and a small straw hat we left behind on the second day.
The Alentejo does not flatter you on arrival. The drive south from Lisbon is one long quiet field, and then another, and then a third. You begin to wonder whether the friend who recommended this region has ever actually been here, or whether they are simply confusing it, in memory, with somewhere prettier.
Then the rice paddies appear, and the umbrella pines, and the light flattens out across them at five in the afternoon, and you understand. We ate, over the course of nine days, at six restaurants. Three of them were beautiful. Two of them were workable. One was both. That one is at the end of this piece, and it is the reason for everything else.
More from the magazine
Stay · BANYAN CAMP, HAMBEGAMUWA, SRI LANKA
A floating deck under the banyan, where the lake does the parenting
Banyan Camp is reached on a road that does not behave like a road. It narrows, then forgets itself, then surrenders to a track of pale red earth that the rain has been arguing with for a decade. You park where a man tells you to park, which is under a tree, and you walk […]
Request these dates
Experiences · KOGGALA LAKE, SOUTHERN, SRI LANKA
The man who knows this coast better than anyone will take you somewhere the guidebooks can’t.
The coast of Southern Sri Lanka looks beautiful from a car window. Naveen will make you want to get out of the car.