With a wine list of more than 600 wines, choosing turns into a challenge at the table of the Chalet Vicente restaurant.
In the hustle and bustle of Estrada Monumental, the Chalet Vicente has merged rural gastronomy and urban life together, in a single place. It is a traditional cuisine, from ‘our grandma’s time’, served in the style of a family environment, reveals Guadalupe Brito, one of the people in charge of the space. As in most our other establishments, food is served in platters and it is up to each person to help him/herself.
The focus is on Portuguese gastronomy in which barbequed dishes such as lamb chops, grilled fish and meat or pepper steak are the key ingredients. As for regional gastronomy and scabbard fish with banana, or passion fruit, are some of the most sought dishes, in a casually styled traditional cuisine.
To pair with these delicacies the Chalet Vicente offers one of the longest wine lists on the island. Be they from the Douro region, Trás-os-Montes, Dão or the peninsula of Setúbal, at the Chalet Vicente, one can find wines from all over Portugal.
There are also the wines from Lisbon, Alentejo, the Algarve, Azores and, naturally, from Madeira; red, white, rosés, green and fortified wines. In total there are six hundred and twenty available references in this entirely Portuguese wine list.
Nélio Ferreira, one of the restaurant’s partners, explains that this diversity comes out of a need to offer the customer ‘a varied option’ and give him/her the chance to get to know the best of what’s ‘made in Portugal’, especially, in Madeira.
Harmony between dishes and wines cannot be lacking when it is time to make a decision at the Chalet Vicente. For Nélio Ferreira, the old rules by which the perfect symbiosis between wine and delicacy were chosen are long gone. What you need is the right wine: We can choose ‘a white wine to have with, less greasy, white meat and even with fish we can have a not as strong red wine such as the Dão’, he exemplifies.
This panoply of references is a bold choice. It requires a very precise management of stock and of the suggestions given to customers. ‘I like to avoid the reference, or recommendation, of a specific brand’ and in a single night ‘I don’t always sell the same wine’, he says.
Besides bottles, the listed wines are also served by the glass. Every two to three months the list reinvents itself in trying to keep up with trends.
Already having to face the difficulty of choosing a meal, when in the Chalet Vicente, it is best to leave the choice of the wine to the experts by asking them: ‘What wine would you recommend?’
