Fine dining in the Azores

My wife, Nancy, and I spent a week in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago approximately 930 miles west of Lisbon, in August 2018.

Through a travel agent, we booked a package* for about $1,365 per person. It included round-trip air from New York and accommodations at the 4-star Hotel Ponta Delgada (Rua João Francisco Cabral, 49, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal), with breakfasts.

Our hotel was well located, in the center of Ponta Delgada, capital of the Azores. The downtown area has restaurants, museums, churches and other places of interest.

We took a short walk the first afternoon, later heading to the hotel’s dining room to begin what I like to call “A Restaurant Tour of the Azores.” (I have used this method before and it has proved successful.)

After dinner, we chatted with the maître d’ and asked what he considered to be the best restaurant in town. He suggested we go to Cais 20 (2^a Rua-Rua Terreiro 41, São Roque, Ponta Delgada; restaurantecais20.pt/en). We asked him if it would be difficult to get a reservation there for the next night. He said it might be difficult but that he’d be happy to do it for us, which, in fact, he did.

The next night at Cais 20, we had a very nice dinner with jumbo shrimp, chicken, dessert and coffee for about $35 per person. Again, we chatted with the maître d’. We told him we were going to be there for the rest of the week and wanted to visit three restaurants that he considered to be his direct competition. He was receptive to the proposal and recommended three.

The first was the São Pedro (Largo Almirante Dunn, 23-A), where, at the Cais 20 maître d’s suggestion, we enjoyed their steak on a “hot-iron” brick placed directly on our table. Again, the price for wine, entrée, dessert and coffee ran around $35 per person.

The next restaurant was A Tasca (Aljube, n° 16), an intriguing place with a lot of atmosphere, since it was converted from a prison. We enjoyed boiled beef and cold shrimp. Along with wine and dessert, the price was around $30 each.

Lastly, Restaurant da Associação Agrícola de São Miguel (Recinto da Feira, Campo de Santana), quite a distance from the downtown area of Ponta Delgada, was a very large restaurant and the most expensive of the ones we visited. We spent about $44 per person for steak, their specialty. In comparison to the other restaurants, this one was quite noisy.

As we had agreed, on our last night in Ponta Delgada, we went back to Cais 20 and told the maître d’ what we thought of the other restaurants. He appreciated our returning and, in a gracious gesture, shared a bottle of wine.

We enjoyed visiting the Azores, a beautiful group of islands with lush green and blue grasses. Even though they’re located in the North Atlantic Ocean, the climate of the nine islands is similar to that of Bermuda. We chose to visit only the largest island, São Miguel. The weather in late August was very pleasant, with daytime temperatures of about 77°F.

We elected to take two all-day tours, one to the parish Sete Cidades and the crater lake Lagoa do Fogo and a van tour of the parish Furnas. Prebooked through our travel agent, each tour cost $88 per person. (It’s easy to circumnavigate the island of São Miguel with a rental car.)

The Sete tour took us along the volcanic rim of the Caldeira das Sete Cidades. This tour was refreshing, but the rocks adjacent to the swimming area were slippery when wet, and there were few guardrails with which to safely enter the pools. At Lagoa do Fogo, a nature preserve offered spectacular views from the top of the crater’s border, and we saw the Caldeira Velha waterfall.

On the western Furnas tour, we enjoyed Terra Nostra Botanical Park, which had an extraordinary collection of plants. We also stopped at a beautiful lake, where they prepared a tasty stew of meat and vegetables by burying the kettle over an underground stream of boiling water and letting it cook slowly in the steam for six hours.

Later in the week we took a half-day boat trip to search for dolphins and humpback whales and were fortunate to see many humpbacks.

The Azores have been largely undiscovered, but they’re becoming popular with European tourists.

VERNON S. HOIUM
Minneapolis, MN

*Through a travel agent, the Hoiums booked a Delta Vacations package to the Azores. However, Delta Air Lines has suspended flights to the Azores in 2020, and Delta Vacations currently is not offering any Azores packages.