Eat & drink
Five rooms, from 07:00 to 01:00
MIRANTE seats 42 once a night. BRASA cooks over coals with its tables standing in the sand. A CASA is open sixteen hours a day, LUMAR lights the ovens at 04:30, and THE BAR pours until one.
- Rooms
- 5
- Covers
- 320 seated
- Service
- 07:00–01:00
- Service charge
- Included
The estate kitchen
One brigade, five rooms, two fires
Everything on the estate is cooked in two kitchens: the main kitchen under the planted roof of the fourth pavilion, and a second kitchen at BRASA that burns wood and has no other heat source.
The two kitchens share a brigade of 34 and a single buying list. Fish is landed at Sines, 32 km down the coast, and at Setúbal, 55 km north, and bought in the morning off whatever came in; the written menus are finished after the boats, which is why the board at BRASA is chalked at 11:00 and not the night before.
Rice comes from the Sado paddies 18 km north of the estate. Olive oil is pressed at Grândola. The pork is Alentejo black pig, the cheese is a ewe's milk from Serpa at eleven months, and the salt is raked from the Comporta pans along the same stretch of coast.
A kitchen garden of 1 100 m² sits on the sheltered, landward side of the ridge in 24 beds: tomatoes until November, broad beans in March, mustard greens, coriander, three mints, and the quince tree in the courtyard that supplies both the cheese course at MIRANTE and the paste at LUMAR. The estate's own stone pines are shaken in October for pine nuts.
The five rooms
Covers and hours as published. MIRANTE, BRASA and THE BAR have pages of their own; A CASA and LUMAR are described below.
MIRANTE
Eight courses, Atlantic and Alentejo, written against the week's landings and rewritten six times a year. One sitting means one menu, leaving the kitchen in the same order for every table.
BRASA
A 3.6 m grill that burns holm oak and nothing else. Whole fish chosen off the ice and sold by weight, under a slatted pine roof with the floor left as sand.
A CASA
The house kitchen. Breakfast from a 6.2 m market table, a short carte through the afternoon, children's supper at 18:00 and the same room laid for dinner at 19:00.
LUMAR
Patisserie, coffee and the bread room. Four doughs are mixed every night, the ovens are lit at 04:30, and the first bread reaches A CASA at 06:40.
THE BAR
Fourteen signature drinks, classics made to specification, six built without alcohol, a spirits library in seven bays and a cellar of 640 references behind it.
What each room is
| Venue | Concept | Covers | Service hours | Dress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MIRANTE | Tasting menu, Atlantic and Alentejo, one sitting | 34 + 8 at the counter | Dinner, Tue–Sat. Doors 19:15, one sitting at 19:30 | Dressed for dinner |
| BRASA | Live-coal beach grill, feet in the sand | 86 | Lunch daily 12:30–16:00; dinner Thu–Sun 19:00–22:30 | As you come off the beach |
| A CASA | All-day house kitchen and market table | 120 | 07:00–23:00, daily | Anything at all |
| LUMAR | Patisserie, coffee and the bread room | 24 | 07:00–18:00, daily | Anything at all |
| THE BAR | The drinking room: 14 signature drinks, classics, six zero-alcohol, seven spirit bays, 640 references | 48 | 16:00–01:00, daily | Dressed for the evening |
320 seats across the five rooms. The hours above are the same in every month of the year.
A CASA
Sixteen hours a day
A CASA opens onto the courtyard water and keeps one room going from seven in the morning until eleven at night. Nothing about it changes at the edges of the day except what is on the table in the middle of it.
That table is 6.2 m of walnut. At 07:00 it carries the morning: bread from LUMAR, sheep's cheeses, figs and melon, four cured things, a tray of pastéis de nata at 07:30 and again at 11:00, eggs cooked to order at the pass behind it. From 12:30 the same table holds the day's vegetables, and the kitchen works a carte of eleven dishes off it.
Children eat at 18:00, before the room is relaid. It is the one service with its own menu, its own cook on the pass and its own hour, so that families are not negotiating with a dinner service and a dinner service is not negotiating with them.
- Breakfast 07:00–11:00, from the market table
- Carte 12:30–15:30, eleven dishes
- Afternoon: bread, cheese, fruit and coffee all day
- Children's supper 18:00, its own menu and its own cook
- Dinner 19:00–22:30, last order 22:00
- In-suite from the same carte, 07:00–23:00
- Covers
- 120
- Hours
- 07:00–23:00
LUMAR — the bread room
LUMAR is a bakery with 24 seats in front of it. The ovens are lit at 04:30; the first baskets go to A CASA at 06:40 and the counter opens at 07:00 with whatever came out last.
Four doughs are mixed every night and 48 kg of flour goes through the room each day. Two of the four are milled from barbela, an old Portuguese wheat grown inland from the estate, which makes a dense, slightly sour crumb and a loaf that keeps for three days instead of one.
The patisserie is short on purpose: six things, changed with the fruit. Pastéis de nata come out at 07:30, 11:00 and 17:00, 180 a day; the quince paste is made in November from the courtyard tree and lasts the year; there is an almond tart that exists because the almonds are pressed 40 km away.
Bread will be left outside a suite door at 08:00 if you ask the night before. Coffee is roasted for the estate in Lisbon and ground to order, which is the whole reason the room smells the way it does at seven in the morning.
The cellar
640 references, 14 °C, cut into the dune
The cellar is a single vaulted room dug into the landward face of the dune, which is the cheapest air conditioning available on this coast: it holds 14 °C and 72% relative humidity without a compressor running.
There are 640 references in it and the weight is deliberately local. Setúbal peninsula and Palmela for Castelão and old Moscatel; Colares for Ramisco grown in sand a few kilometres up the same shoreline; Alentejo for the reds that go with the grill; Bairrada and Douro for the older bottles. France and Germany are there, in quantity, but they are not the point of the list.
Twenty-six references are open by the glass across the estate on any evening, which is a function of the bar's preservation bench rather than generosity. The tasting table in the cellar seats six and is used for the pairing menus at MIRANTE and for one standing tasting a week.
- 640 references; 26 open by the glass on any evening
- 14 °C and 72% RH, held by 2.4 m of dune rather than plant
- The tasting table seats 6
- Pairings at MIRANTE: Atlantic, Cellar, and one with no alcohol in it
Reserving a table
Four questions the reservations desk answers most often.
MIRANTE, always. It takes 42 people once a night, five nights a week, so a seat released late cannot be refilled; residents are asked to confirm by 12:00 on the day of the sitting.
BRASA takes walk-ins at lunch and is better reserved for dinner, when there are four services a week and 86 seats. A CASA and LUMAR are walk-in rooms at every hour they are open. THE BAR holds a third of its 48 seats for people who simply arrive.
A CASA serves a children's supper at 18:00 with its own menu and its own cook on the pass. BRASA does half plates from the coals at any hour it is open, and the grill will cook a piece of fish plain for anyone of any age.
MIRANTE seats guests of 12 and over at the tables and 16 and over at the counter, because the sitting runs to about three hours and the counter is a working pass.
MIRANTE publishes a vegetarian eight written in parallel with the main menu, at the same length and the same price. A vegan eight is cooked with 48 hours' notice.
LUMAR bakes a gluten-free loaf each morning and both kitchens hold it, so bread arrives with the meal rather than after it. For anything else, write to [email protected] with the reservation and the kitchen will answer with what it can actually do.
The A CASA carte is served in every suite from 07:00 to 23:00, on the terrace if the weather allows, with the table laid and collected.
The Lagoa Villa has a working kitchen of its own and a cook will come to it for the evening, given a day's notice; the menu is agreed beforehand and the shopping is done on the morning of the dinner.
Reserve a table
Tables at MIRANTE open 90 days ahead. Everything else on the estate can be arranged in the week before you arrive, or on the morning of the day itself.