Discover how Vila Vita Parc’s restaurant in Guia brings together open-fire cooking, fresh local ingredients and a modern take on traditional Algarve flavours
There is something wonderfully audacious about opening a sophisticated new restaurant devoted to cooking over fire in Guia. After all, this unassuming Algarve town has been playing with charcoal for a rather long time.
Guia is the spiritual home of piri-piri chicken, where generations of loyal customers return to whichever of the local chicken restaurants happens to be their favourite.
Here, they enjoy the simple feast of small chickens grilled over charcoal, basted with a good piri-piri sauce and served with salad and chips – a combination considerably greater than the sum of its parts.
So when Vila Vita Parc decided to open its latest restaurant here, it wisely did not attempt to reinvent Guia’s most famous dish. Instead, Ciro takes the town’s long relationship with fire and runs with it in an altogether more ambitious direction.
The restaurant describes its approach as Mediterranean fire cooking, with ingredients grilled, slow-cooked, cured, fermented and glazed, and a menu designed largely for sharing.
At the centre of the operation is an open-flame kitchen, deliberately visible from the dining room rather than hidden behind closed doors.
And for me, that kitchen is the star of the show. I have a weakness for restaurants that cook over fire, but Ciro takes the idea rather further. Walking into the restaurant, I was immediately impressed by the grill station in the open-plan kitchen.
This is no token barbecue but a very serious piece of kit, and quite obviously the engine room of the restaurant.
There is something almost primeval about watching good ingredients being cooked over real fire.
In an age when increasingly sophisticated kitchen technology can make cooking feel almost laboratory-like, there is considerable pleasure in seeing chefs return to the oldest cooking technique of them all.
Of course, cooking with fire is currently extremely fashionable. From London to Madrid, Copenhagen to Dubai, seemingly every other ambitious new restaurant has discovered wood, charcoal and embers – but not always with the best results. Ciro, thankfully, feels more convincing.
Part of that is because of where it is. Fire does not feel like a gimmick in Guia. It belongs here. Ciro occupies premises on Rua General Humberto Delgado in the centre of the village and is a natural extension of the considerable gastronomic operation at Vila Vita Parc.
Yet it does not feel like a hotel restaurant transplanted into town.
The design is warm and contemporary, with several different indoor and outdoor dining areas. There is a pleasing earthiness to the place that suits the concept, wherever you happen to be seated.
But my tip is to ask for a table in the main dining room, where you can watch the chefs at work on the grill station.
Nearly everything on the menu comes into contact with fire in one way or another. On our last visit, one of our starters was local cockles (berbigão), steamed open on the grill and served with smoked olive oil and a herb dressing.
We also had king prawns, lightly grilled and served with a wonderfully rich sauce made from the prawn heads. At this stage, it is important to mention the outstanding sourdough bread – baked in a wood-fired oven, naturally. A whole loaf arrives for two people to share and is ideal for mopping up the juices and sauces from the starters.
For main courses there are daily specials, including prime butcher’s cuts, but one dish not to be missed is Ciro’s answer to Guia’s famous chicken piri-piri: slices of boneless chicken, gently grilled and served with a delicious, slightly spicy sauce. It is recognisably inspired by the local classic without attempting to imitate it.
There is actually nothing particularly complicated about the food here. The overriding idea is to take good ingredients and make them taste great through the intelligent use of fire.
It sounds simple, but anyone who has attempted to cook a piece of fish or an expensive steak over charcoal will know that controlling live fire requires far more judgement than setting an oven to 180ºC.
The difference between smoke adding complexity and simply making dinner taste like an ashtray can be remarkably small.
That was another reason I found myself watching the kitchen so much during my last visit. The grill is not merely theatre for the dining room. The cooks are constantly moving things around, judging the heat and working with different areas of the fire.
You get the sense that the restaurant’s success ultimately depends upon the skill of the people standing in front of those coals.
There is also a nice irony to Ciro’s arrival. Guia became famous for one of Portugal’s simplest restaurant dishes and now, just steps away from the traditional chicken restaurants, Vila Vita has created one of the Algarve’s most sophisticated interpretations of cooking over fire.
The two worlds are not as far apart as they might initially appear. Both depend on understanding heat. Both depend on good ingredients. And both demonstrate that smoke and flame can produce flavours which no amount of clever kitchen equipment can ever quite replicate.
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