The Slow Meal

I had dinner recently at a restaurant in Tavira that I'd been meaning to visit for a while. Mesa Farta, a place near the train station run by a young chef called João Viegas who grew up in Tavira, trained in some of the best kitchens in Europe and recently came home to open his own place.

The menu is entirely local in ingredient and very much its own thing in approach. The conversation moved easily between dishes in the way that a good meal makes natural. Not because we tried to make it do that, but because when the food is genuinely interesting and the room is comfortable and there's no particular reason to leave, things tend to unfold without effort.

This is something I've noticed over years of shared meals. The table is an underrated setting for almost any kind of conversation. Something about the ritual of eating together, the shared focus, the natural pauses, the way a good dish gives you something to discuss that isn't about either of you, removes whatever awkwardness might otherwise exist. People talk more easily across a table than they do face to face in a room with no particular purpose.

The best meals I've had in the Algarve have almost all followed the same shape. They started with one conversation and ended, two or three hours later, somewhere quite different. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because that's what enough time and good food and the absence of pressure tends to produce.

Mesa Farta is worth booking ahead. It fills up.