After a nice, scenic afternoon of hiking from Aguçadoura, we arrived in the coastal resort town of Apúlia, which sports a nice, large harbor, a good sandy beach, and a scenic series of sand dunes all topped with old windmills with a boardwalk connecting them. However, being a Sunday evening, we had to deal with a logistical issue: a good fraction of the dining establishments in town, even those still open in the off-season, are closed on Sundays. But luckily, one of the town’s better fine dining restaurants, Moinho de Sal (“Salt Mill”, as in windmill), was open and we managed to get reservations.
Nestled into a small business area right in the shadow of the dunes, Moinho de Sal specializes in seafood, offering up a range of fresh seafood dishes, a good selection of wine, and some nice desserts in a very modern and refreshing restaurant interior (nice enough that I was glad we had a chance to shower up and change out of our hiking clothes).
As we got seated, the staff brought out a nice little appetizer of a particularly nice tuna paté. Soft and creamy, this was garnished with pink peppercorns that gave just a little bit of bright spice to this, halfway between black pepper and red pepper in overall note. A great start to the overall meal.
While my two favorite types of wine from previous Portugal visits were Port and a good Douro red made with Touriga Nacional, I do like one of Portugal’s more informal wines, a Vinho Verde. For our primary wine for the dinner, we selected one of the nicer Vino Verdes, Quinta Casa da Tapada in Fiscal, Portugal. Nice soft notes, light acid, and a slight bit of carbonation made this both an enjoyable wine and a good between-course palate cleanser.
For the main course, Dan and Sophie opted to split a dish, whitefish in puff pastry. A simple dish (my reviewing notes and pictures of the menu don’t reveal the exact type of fish), but nicely executed: nice, tender, and flaky white fish, lightly seasoned, and baked in a nice buttery puff pastry exterior. While simple, getting a dish like right takes some skill to make sure neither the pastry nor fish are over- or under-cooked.
The whitefish dish was served with tomato rice, arroz tomate. Unlike it’s close Spanish cousin, this is a more soup-like dish, essentially a rich seafood broth tomato soup. This would have been a good dish on its own, but it was a particularly good accompaniment to the pastry and fish of the main dish.
Meanwhile, Carol and I split the paella prawns for two. A bit deceptively named, this was a very generous dish (almost enough for all four of us), not only with prowns, but sea bass, tiger prawns, small prawns, and rodovalbi (turbot). We really enjoyed this dish: the rice itself was rich, flavorful, and well-crusted like I expect in a good paella. Both the tiger prawns atop and the small prawns in the rice were really nicely done, and the latter dominated the flavor of the rice with good, rich flavor. While dining on the dish, we had a hard time telling the final seafood ingredient (originally suspecting it to be eel), but after a rather entertaining mixed Portuguese and English back and forth, with more than a little bit of Google Image Search and Google Translate, to figure out this was turbot. It was quite delicious, however.
Overall, I liked Moinho de Sal. Due to mild allergies, seafood often isn’t my first choice, but they served us good, fresh, quality seafood with some nicely-concieved flavor profiles, and the paella was one of the more enjoyable dishes of our entire trip. I’d happily go back.
