Wednesday, 9 January 2013

Ribadouro, Lisbon, Portugal

RIBADOURO.......?
Where, and what is Ribadouro?

It's a seafood speciality restaurant in the Portuguese city of Lisbon.
A seafood restaurant in Lisbon, well, there must be hundreds of them about, what would make this one stand out?.
Well!, it just so happens to be a specialist in the finest, fresh seafood, (at least the dinner menu does anyway, i suspect the lunch menu also).

There seems to be a very formal layout to this restaurant, which was not really the kind of dining i had in mind for this evening. Never mind!, The live lobsters in the fish tanks to the entrance of the restaurant were not complaining, so why should i?.

The inner dining room has a curved bar area on the bottom right, with a large curved seating area in the centre of the room, with the usual table and chair seating around the room.
Lighting in the room is very good, not too dark, and not too bright.

We are asked to be seated by our waiter, quite quickly (not very busy at the moment, i think it's because we are eating quite early). The waiter has speaks a few words of English, so were quite relaxed about ordering.

The menu arrives.
There is a great variety of seafood dishes on offer, some quite exotic and on the expensive side for our budget, some of the exotic Lobsters were around the €100, but their King Prawn dish is around €30.

Whilst we are looking at the menu, the waiter comes a platter of butters, cheese, i saw bread, and a dressed Crab, (we know already that if you decide to eat any of these items they will be charged onto your bill).

There were plenty of opportunities to order drinks from fine wines, other beverages, to just plain mineral water.
  • The menu seems exclusively seafood related, and we seem drawn to our own kind of preferred dishes, we choose 3 items, which were: A shredded potato and  Cod, dish, (with onion, olives,cod of course, and shredded potatoes), which had a sprinkling of chopped parsley.
The shredded potato and cod dish.

This dish had more cod than it looks, as it was all under the shredded potato. The different tastes of the dish works really well, and the cod was cooked perfectly.
  • 2 X Mariscos Mariniere, which was King Prawns with some Lobster meat in a thick, and creamy, (white wine, cream, onions, and eggs) sauce. .
The King Prawn dish comes with shallow fried bread toast.

The taste of the dish was really, very good, the prawns were cooked perfectly, the sauce was rich and had a good wine taste, with great  flavour, (i think they must have used some lobster and shells cooked in the sauce to give extra depth). As we found some lobster meat in the sauce.

We also ordered a portion of plain cooked basmati rice.

The waiter carefully portions each plate, using soup spoon and fork with good skill, to make the plate look like this.

The layout of the food was nicely presented, the aroma from the prawns was lovely.

Dessert?
Dessert was unfortunately out of the question, as the portions were on the large side of large, so with regret we will decline the offer this evening.

Coffee?
Drinking coffee so late at night is not to be advised for me, if one wishes to sleep well and awake refreshed the next day.

As we settle the bill, it seems to have become rather busier than when we first arrived.

Conclusion:  Ribadouro.......Wonderful Food!
I think i shall give a score for Taste of the Food:  9 and 1/2.
And the Price: 7 (A little bit high, but has large portions)

I do hope you enjoy my post, and I thank you for reading.

This seems like one of those restaurants that become very busy in the late evening, (which is normal for the local Portuguese in Lisbon, to eat quite late), it's fine for them, that seems fantastic, with their climate I would do the same. But when travelling with the younger generation who go to school, eating late is not an ideal option, so we tend to avoid dining too far beyond their usual bedtime, although bending a few limits on bedtime on holiday is OK on the rare occasion.

If you wish to contact the Restaurant directly:
http://www.cervejariaribadouro.pt/uk.html
Av. da Liberdade 155LisbonPortugal


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