After leaving the pleasant seaside town of Esposende, the Caminho Português da Costa takes an inland detour through some coastal marshes, and after a pleasant day of hiking we ended up in the small town of Castelo do Neiva, staying in one of the most elaborate and luxurious hotels of our Portugal trip, the Quinta do Monteverde, a 17th century manor house with large outdoor gardens and pools. The Quinta’s innkeeper pointed us at two feasible options for dinner: Picanha Brasil Oficial, a Brazilian BBQ place, and O Tasco Regional, a wine and petiscos bar. We opted for the latter, heading up to the top of the hill in Castelo do Neiva.
While the exterior of O Tasco Regional is pretty modest, once you get inside, O Tasco has a great “wine bar” interior: the walls are all covered with wine bottles, the ceiling has several hams hanging from it, and there’s a small bar at one end of the room. It is quite a cozy little joint, and O Tasco has only a small handful of tables for diners, so unless you are on the early side like we are, make reservations.
The big thing you can’t miss at O Tasco is the wine bottles. Arranged primarily by region and secondarily by price, this made for a particularly nice experience: we easily located a favorite Douro Red from our previous trip (from Quinta dos Murças) and an Altas Quintas Talha Tinto that Dan was familiar with in the Portalegre region. Both were particularly enjoyable.
As mentioned above, the menu at O Tasco’s menu is basically petiscos, the Portuguese cousin to the similar Spanish Tapas, with a bunch of smaller dishes designed for table sharing. With that in mind, we ordered a few appetizers and a few larger main courses. First out was a common dish encountered many times in Portugal: Pimentos Padrón. The version here was quite good: a large plate of tender, well-grilled and flavorful Padrón peppers with a nice sear, topped with fresh olive oil and large sea salt crystals (reminder to self: next time I visit the Minha, there are a lot of good sources of sea salt in the area…)
Next up was Gambas ao alho: pan-seared shrimp in a particularly bold and garlicky butter and olive oil sauce. These were perfectly-cooked: the maximum tenderness without getting rubbery, a nice blistering on the shells, and the heads left on which really does help a lot with the flavor.
Our first main course was Bife Posta. A Portuguese cut of beef approximately corresponding to the American Top Loin/New York Strip, this was cooked to a perfect medium-rate with a nice sear, and garnish with sea salt. This was pretty much a perfectly-cooked steak, and an excellent deal (€20 got enough beef and frites for everyone to have a small-sized steak frites).
And while the Bife Posta was excellent, the star of the evening was the Pernil, a perfectly-roasted pork shoulder with crackling skin, served over potatoes roasted in the pork fat. Everything here was perfect: the pork itself nicely banded with fat, tender, with the exposed fat cap cooked to a perfect crackle. The dripping from the pork combined with the nicely roasted potatoes. One of the absolute best dishes of our trip, this was delightful, and only €19.
So, we adored O Tasco. The food was some of the very best of this trip to Portugal, the staff friendly and helpful, and the wine selection extensive but affordable. I’d definitely come back, but make sure to get reservations if you aren’t an early bird like us hikers.
