Castelo Branco is the major city of the district in which Penamacor is located. The municipality has over 50,000 inhabitants, and is home to a polytechnic college, and some manufacturing industry, providing components to the car industry. When we first visited, the city also boasted at least two strictly vegetarian restaurants, both of which we sampled.

The more modest establishment traded under the name Namaste, which won it no prizes for originality. (A quick Google research reveals that in almost any self-respecting town in England you will find a Namaste restaurant.) It was a no-frills establishment, offering, each day, a different set menu with no choices. The food was tasty, if relatively unexciting, and incredibly good value for money. The ambience was relaxed and casual, and the decor was similarly laid back, offering an eclectic choice of chair styles and cutlery.

All of that last paragraph is written in the past tense because, sadly, Namaste became one of the victims of Covid-19. On this last trip, however, we found that, as is so often the case, another similarly modest establishment has sprung up. Eschewing the Indian vibe of its predecessor, this trades under the unabashed name Fast Vegan, and what they say is what you get. When we went en famille to Castelo Branco, we planned to eat at the other, rather more up-market, vegetarian restaurant, but, in the event, my navigation brought us to Fast Vegan Café.

This was a slight disappointment because Michael and Tslil had explained to Tao the concept of choosing one’s meal from a range of dishes offered on a menu, and he was rather intrigued by the prospect of this novelty. However, Fast Vegan offered, again, a no-choice menu (with the exception of dessert). Fortunately, the main dish of the day was rotini (or pasta twirls, as I have always called them) in a vegan Bolognese sauce, accompanied by a simple but very fresh salad, all of which Tao heartily approved of, as, indeed, did we all.

The day out had begun with a visit to the municipal park, which boasts a very good adventure playground as well as a small wooded area, a cafe and several feature fountains. The plan had been for us to split up after lunch, with the kids going shopping for work clothes at a large outlet, and Bernice and I shopping for bathroom accessories at a nearby store. In the event, Tao was fairly exhausted from the park, and we all agreed that we would call it a day after lunch.

This meant that the following day Bernice and I returned to Castelo alone, to complete our shopping. After a successful morning, we drove into the centre of the city and went in search of the other, posher, eating establishment – Restaurant Mãos de Horta, which sounds to my ear considerably more enticing than Fast Vegan Café. Incidentally, I just Google translated Mãos de Horta; it apparently means ‘Hands to the Vegetable Garden’. Then I googled Mãos de Horta in the hope of finding out what ‘hands to the vegetable garden’ is supposed to mean. I came across a book of the same name, which is a ‘How to’ book for Portuguese aspiring backyard vegetable gardeners.

This turned out to be in the same location as the restaurant we had eaten in for my 70^th birthday: another story of a restaurant closing and another opening.

Online, the previous evening, I had established that the restaurant was open from 12 noon until 2AM, Tuesday to Saturday, with live music and what I am unreliably informed is a ‘funky vibe’ in the later evening hours. We reasoned that at 2PM, when we planned to arrive, the vibe, if there was one, would be rather more subdued. Unfortunately, the previous evening was Monday, so we were unable to phone to confirm those opening hours. However, we decided to take our chances.

We approached the restaurant door through a very pleasant outdoor terrace, where tables with linen tablecloths were warmed by autumnal early afternoon sun. This looked promising.

When we arrived at the door, it was closed but unlocked, which we took to be a good sign. Inside, there were no customers, and no staff in sight, which we took to be a bad sign. And yet, a recording of a very easy-on-the-ear jazz piano trio was playing in the background, which was surely encouraging. When a pleasant young man appeared behind the well-stocked bar in response to my ‘Hola!’, our spirits rose. However, when he explained apologetically that they had just closed for lunch until 6PM, our spirits fell again.

Rather uncharacteristically, I decided that I wasn’t prepared to fold in the face of what might be a bluff. I knew that the alternative to a meal on a sunlit terrace, washed in jazz piano, was a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, and a couple of handfuls of peanuts and almonds, sitting in the car. I put on my most pitiful face and asked whether there weren’t any crumbs from the floor that they could offer us. The young man immediately disappeared to ‘ask the chef if there was anything he could do’ (Hurrah!) and returned a minute later, looking, again, a little apologetic (Oh no!) and explained that the only thing the chef could offer was the set menu of the day. (Yes!!) Without even asking what that was (there are few disgusting surprises that a vegan restaurant can offer), we gleefully accepted, and stepped back outside to choose a table.

Over the next 40 minutes, we enjoyed a delicious, if luridly purple, beetroot soup, followed by a main course that consisted of four separate dishes on a single rectangular plate. The presentation was unflashy but very tasteful. A mound of thin spaghetti with peanut and leaf in a beet sauce; a fresh-tasting mangold salad; a cylinder of plain perfectly boiled rice topped with a chewy mushroom sauce; a salsa-topped salad crowned with one perfect fresh raspberry. The dish was a delight to the eye and then the palette. Each of the four dishes offered a combination of contrasting and complementary textures and flavours. Taken together, the four presented a very rich and varied meal. Bernice chose to accompany this with mint tea, and was brought a proper china pot that yielded four cups. I chose a refreshing iced tea.

Bernice passed on dessert, but I was tempted by one of Portugal’s typical custardy dishes, which was fine but unexciting, and an excellent espresso. As we waited for the bill to arrive, we played our usual game. ‘What would you expect to pay for that meal in a similar restaurant in Israel?’ This was not an easy question to answer. The standard of food presentation that we had enjoyed, the fine linen and tableware, the easy charm of the waiter, tend to be found in Israel only in restaurants that are more up-market than this one ostensibly was. However, since all of those apparent peripherals actually contribute significantly to the pleasure of the dining experience, it is not unreasonable to take these factors into account when ‘pricing’ the equivalent meal in Israel.

This is, of course, a game that we play with marked cards, because we are smugly confident that, in inland Portugal, we are going to be pleasantly surprised by how cheap the meal will actually be. However, in this case, the degree of our surprise surprised even us, if you follow me. For 21 euros, the two of us ate a meal that would, we reckon, have cost us at least 65 euros in Israel. We also came to the conclusion that, although the restaurant had changed, the chef almost certainly had not, since the style and the considered presentation of the food, coupled with the delicate flavourfulness of the meal, reminded us of the meal we had eaten in the same location 20 months earlier. We are fairly sure that this is a case of rebranding to reboot as Portugal emerged from lockdown. Unfortunately, the waiter could not confirm our suspicions, since he had only arrived in the city, and started working in the restaurant, a couple of weeks earlier.

At this point, I hope that at least some of you are puzzled by the apparent dissonance between my enthusiastic review of the meal and the contemptuously dismissive title of this week’s post. Well, the time has come to tell you more of the dietary preferences of the kids’ dog, Lua. She has a regular diet of dogfood and water, which she eats with what seems more a sense of duty than real pleasure. On the other hand, she will turn metaphorical somersaults for fish skin and bones, which, sadly, the kids never provide her with. Fortunately, while we are there, we eat fish regularly. If, on our return in January, she remembers us and greets us warmly, I for one will not be fooled; I can recognize cupboard love when I see it.

Lua’s other favourite treat is dairy. She will lick a butter wrapper or a yoghourt carton so clean that you could eat your dinner off it, as it were. However, on our first expedition to the supermarket on this last trip, we accidentally bought vegan yoghourts. Almost everyone was perfectly happy with them, but when Bernice tossed a finished carton to Lua, she took one sniff and walked away in disgust. She is a dog that (hands up those Brits with long memories) can tell Stork from butter….without even tasting it.

Tao, thankfully, is a considerably less fussy eater.