Vila Vita Parc's Fine Wines & Food Fair - A Most Fabulous Weekend in Sunny Algarve

Vila Vita Parc

Vila Vita Parc is a luxury 5 star hotel in Algarve, Portugal, reputedly one of the top hotels in the country, it is set on a cliff top with breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean, just a 40 minute drive from Faro airport.

Set over 54 acres of subtropical gardens, with a golf course, numerous swimming pools, a tennis court and spa, and no fewer than 8 restaurants, Vila Vita Parc is a member of the Leading Hotels of the World. Its top restaurant, Ocean, has 2 Michelin stars. 

We were there to sample a couple of days from the biennial Vila Vita Parc's Fine Wines and Food Fair.  Now in its 8th year, this year’s event took place over 9 days from 5th to 13th May 2019. 

There is a tempting programme of gastronomic experiences, including dinners from Hans Neuner, Head Chef of the 2 Michelin starred Ocean restaurant, as well as an impressive line up of international chefs from Europe and the USA.

There were also wine tastings and masterclasses with some of the Europe’s top winemakers and gourmet food producers.

Our visit took place during the closing days of the event, including the highlight of the festival, the Saturday night Kitchen Party featuring 40 food stations where chefs were paired with gourmet food and wine producers and a live jazz band and a disco at the end – more on that later.

Accommodation at Vila Vita Parc ranges from exclusive Ocean View private villas to Junior Suites, and many gradations in between.

Our room was spacious and beautifully furnished, evoking the blue and white azulejos of traditional Portuguese houses in a completely modern way.

The room had beautiful local pottery and vases, and sliding doors to a private balcony with views of the sea, and also a Nespresso machine for that coffee fix whenever you fancy it.

It is wonderful to visit a hotel with such a strong culture around gastronomy – besides the dishes on offer in the fair itself, we also had excellent food from the hotel’s extensive breakfast buffets, a great lunch at the Mediterranean restaurant, Bela Vita, and dinner at the traditional Portuguese restaurant Aldega.

The breakfast buffet was exceptional, with various stations featuring cut tropical fruit, a mouthwatering range of local cheeses, hams and charcuterie, and some top quality patisserie including a daily change of traditional Portuguese cakes and pastries.

Fine Portuguese cakes and pastries are baked on the premises daily and available at the hotel’s café.  Vila Vita Parc’s Pastel de Nata was probably the best I have ever eaten – perfectly textured pastry, filled to the brim with rich and creamy egg custard.

Dinner at the Portuguese Aldega Restaurant was also noteworthy.  We had a mouthwatering monkfish stew with prawns and clams in a rich tomato, pepper and paprika sauce, served in a Portuguese cataplana pot.

Equally delicious was the oven-roasted suckling pig - this was meltingly tender and with great crackling, served with crunchy potatoes and a spicy sauce.

At Bela Vita restaurant, we had another great meal, including a sirloin steak with an intense flavour and the creamiest layer of fat, from cattle raised in the Herdade dos Grous region. It came with a rich, buttery truffled potato mash.

We also loved the surf and turf combination of monkfish and mussels stew with white beans and chorizo – heartwarming and delicious.  

A simple side of spinach sautéed with pine nuts and raisins might seem an odd thing to mention, but it was so delicious and as I write this, I am making a mental note to cook this combination at home.

Inside Kopke Wine Masterclass

One of the fair’s events was a wine masterclass given by Carlos Alves, the Head Winemaker of Kopke, the oldest Port wine house in Porto. Kopke was established in 1638 by German businessman Nicolau Kopke, although it did not have its own vineyard until the 1780s.

Unusually for a Port tasting, Alves decided to devote the entire event to white Port.  Representing just 10% of Port wine production, white Port is popular in Portugal as a simple fresh fortified wine to be drunk either on its own, chilled, or with ice and tonic water. We started with one of these, a Dry White Porto was fresh, dry and with tropical fruit flavours. The sweeter Kopke Lágrima White was golden brown in colour, with rich complex orange peel, honey and vanilla flavours.

We had a selection of Colheita (single vintage year) white Ports including the 2003 and 2008, before moving to the most venerable blended Ports – aged for 10, 20, 30 and even 40 years in oak barrels before bottling for selling. Producing Ports of this age is an expensive business, not just because of the need for a lot of storage space (by law, in any year, Port houses have to keep two thirds of their stock and sell only up to a third), but also because up to 5% of the volume is lost each year through evaporation.

This was a real eye-opener of a tasting, experiencing the range and complexity of white Ports available in Portugal, and is something I would love to explore more, as I learnt that these Ports make a great accompaniment to sashimi as well as cheese.

The Kitchen Party 

We were thrilled to take part in The Kitchen Party at Vila Vita Parc to celebrate the 2019 Fine Wines and Food Fair. The event kicked off with an open-air Pommery Champagne reception on the hotel grounds, with breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean.

This was followed by the party itself, a casual mingling event, where all 18 participating chefs cooked their signature dishes for us to try, plus numerous stands of wine makers and food producers. There was a live jazz band too, free flowing bubbles and fine wines.

Chef Dieter Koschina from 2 Michelin star restaurant Vila Joya made a wonderful dish of layers of tuna tartare and tomato salsa topped with a bright green Jalapeño chilli foam, light as air and delicate, which for me was the finest dish of the event.

Flying the British flag, Nigel Haworth from one Michelin starred Northcote Hotel & Restaurant in Lancashire cooked a fantastic “British taco” - a thin crumpet topped with king crab, trout caviar and various types of seaweed and herbs.

Iran born, Reza Korouji from Berlin, brought his luxurious Imperial Caviar to the event, served with a shot of chilled seafood bisque.

Vila Vita Parc’s own 2 Michelin starred Restaurante Ocean headed by Chef Hans Neuner served another highlight - massive red Mediterranean prawns barbecued and served with a delectable mango salsa.

There were numerous Portuguese wine makers showing their finest fare - noteworthy was Celso de Lemo’s Quinta de Lemos winery from Dão region, that served us the some of the best red wines we tried during the entire festival.

How lucky of me to bump into mixologist Pedro Paulo - Portuguese born, but a Londoner at heart, Pedro is One Aldwych Hotel’s top bar man - his cocktail of London dry gin, St Germain liquor and Champagne, topped with edible gold leaves had everyone queuing up for it!

The Fine Wines & Food Fair at Vila Vita Parc has got to be one of the most significant, delectable and fun gastronomic events in Europe that I have attended in my 10 years of food writing. Look out for their 2021 dates, but if that is too long to wait, why not come to the Algarve and visit Vila Vita Parc in the meantime.

Travel Essentials

Vila Vita Parc
Rua AnneliesePohl
Alporchinhos
8400-450 Porches
Algarve
Portugal
www.vilavitaparc.com
Rooms cost from €355 per night including breakfast. 

Fine Wines and Food Fair
https://www.finewinesfoodfair.com/

Disclaimer

The London Foodie attended as a guest of Vila Vita Parc.  However, complete editorial control remained with Luiz Hara.

Discovering the Best of Filipino Cooking & the Country's Hottest Restaurant Tables at Madrid Fusion Manila

With over 7000 tropical islands, there is just so much to discover about the Philippines. The archipelago and its people are brimming with variety and character, and the food scene has been making huge strides in recent times. So how lucky was I to visit it twice in the last 12 months, with the last of these trips coinciding with the annual gastronomic conference - Madrid Fusion Manila.

Lechon (roast sukling pig) for breakfast, no better way to start the day!

Madrid Fusion is a well-established food symposium held every year in Spain’s capital aiming to highlight new developments in gastronomy, with chefs old and new demonstrating their culinary know-how.

The grand opening for Madrid Fusion Manila gastronomic conference

An offshoot of this and now in its third year, the Madrid Fusion Manila takes place in the Filipino capital every April. The conference is an important date in the gastronomic calendar of the country and has helped to drive innovation and quality improvement in the food of the Philippines.

Madrid Fusion Manila 2017

Manila is an exciting place to be these days if you are a chef or foodie, with so much happening on the culinary scene and new restaurant openings, there is also a renewed focus on the unique local produce and on creative ways of using it. The result is that Manila has a number of rising restaurant stars who dig deep into the culinary traditions of the Philippines, but more on that later.

Unique Filipino Ingredients at Madrid Fusion Manila

International participation in this year’s Madrid Fusion Manila was seriously impressive, with chefs from Indonesia, Korea, Hong Kong, USA and Singapore joining their European counterparts. With the theme of the conference being sustainability, there was a strong emphasis on foraging and fermentation with a number of restaurants growing their own food, including the UK’s Simon Rogan of L’Enclume, one of the conference’s international chefs.

Chefs from all corners of the world attending Madrid Fusion Manila

Without wanting to sound partisan, Rogan’s presentation at Madrid Fusion Manila was for me outstanding. Taking the conference theme of sustainability to heart, he did not bring a single ingredient with him from home but went to the local farmers’ market on arrival in Manila for inspiration. There he purchased all the produce for the dishes he was still to create and demonstrate at the conference. Such self-confidence is perhaps not surprising - I have tried Simon Rogan’s cooking in the UK on a number of occasions, and consider him one of the top chefs in the country.

The UK was represented by Simon Rogan of L'Enclume

But for me the real stars of the show were the local Filipino chefs.  

I met and interviewed Josh Boutwood, son of a Filipino father and a British mother who trained as a chef in Europe. Though born in the UK, Boutwood considers the Philippines home, having spent his early years on the tropical island of Boracay. In 2010, after stints in Scandinavia and the UK, and wishing to build on Filipino traditional flavours, he returned to the island of Boracay to open his restaurant, Alchemy.

Chef Josh Boutwood - Image Courtesy of Tatler Philippines

In January 2017, at the age of 30, he opened his own private-dining restaurant, The Test Kitchen, in Manila. Seating only 22 and with an ever-changing menu of 6 to 8 courses, his is one of the hottest tables in Manila right now. 

Boutwood spoke to me with candour about the Filipinos’ quest to find their own culinary identity, in a country with so many influences – Chinese, Spanish, American, Malay as well as a strong indigenous culture. It is encouraging to see someone relatively young but with such experience and talent flying the flag for the country’s cuisine. 

Another local chef to look out for in Manila is Jordy Navarra, who has been making a name for himself at his Toyo Eatery after working at the Fat Duck and Hibiscus in London.

Navarra is also a real advocate for the country’s local produce, sharing the stage with a fisherman he brought all the way from his village in the north to demonstrate how he fillets dorado. Because they can only fish for two months of the year, their catch is dried in the sun, then salted and smoked. Navarra uses this for Kinilaw, a Filipino version of ceviche, made with vinegar, pickled ginger, onion, lime zest and coriander flowers.

Two other Filipino celebrity chefs I got to meet at Madrid Fusion Manila, although they were not speaking this year, were Claude Tayag and Margarita Forés whose knowledge and enthusiasm for Filipino cooking were inspiring. 

Forés is the founder of the Cibo Group of Italian restaurants, which are scattered around the more upmarket neighbourhoods of Manila. She was awarded Asia’s Best Female Chef in 2016 by San Pellegrino, and is one of the most famous names in the capital’s food scene.

The delightful Chef Margarita Fores of Cibo Restaurants

As well as hosting us at a local Farmer’s Market in Manila, where Margarita showed us around and introduced us to local vendors and produce, she also served up a cracking plate of corn piadina, sautéed river prawn, with crab head cream sauce and candied calamansi lime at the conference. This was one of the best dishes I had during the three days there.

Visit to the Famers Market in Manila

It was at the Farmer’s Market that Margarita Forés introduced me to sea grapes, a local delicacy known in the Philippines as lato, but also native to Okinawa in Japan (known as umi-budō) and the East Malaysian state of Sabah (where it is called latok).

Filipino Sea Grapes known as Lato

Noteworthy also was the huge variety of exotic tropical fruit and vegetables, and the freshness and great quality of the fish and seafood on sale.

Fresh seafood at Farmers Market in Manila

Claude Tayag, a Filipino polymath who writes and paints as well as being an award-winning self-taught chef was also at the conference. He is an authority on the cuisine of Pampanga (a province in central Luzon), which he serves at Bale Dutung (Wooden House), his home turned into a by-reservation-only restaurant. Bale Dutung reached stardom when Anthony Bourdain made it the location of the Philippine episode of his TV show, “No Reservations” in 2008.

Chef Claude Tayag

Claude Tayag presented a delectable Filipino dessert ‘Maja Lila’. Normally a ‘blanca’ or white pudding made with coconut and corn, his version was lilac because of the native purple ube, served with a lip-smacking salted quail egg yolk – certainly one of the highlights of the conference.

Maja Lila by Chef Claude Tayag

Though not Filipino, Chele Gonzalez is the Chef Patron at Gallery Vask in Manila, heralded as the best restaurant in the Philippines by San Pellegrino, as well as being listed 35th among the top 50 restaurants in Asia in 2017.

As part of the many activities around the conference, participants have the opportunity to sign up to various dinners hosted by the chefs, and if you plan a visit to Madrid Fusion Manila in 2018 or later, I highly recommend signing up to one of these events.  

I attended the one such dinner at Gallery Vask, where chefs from Locavore, Nerua in Bilbao and Odette in Singapore, collaborated with Gonzalez to prepare an outstanding tasting menu.

Every day of the conference there is a long themed lunch break with restaurants of different regions of the country showing their best fares. It is a great opportunity to sample a tremendous spread of Filipino specialities under one roof.

In 2017 the themes were Luzon and Rice, Vizayas and Nose to Tail, and Mindanao and Corn.

The most interesting of these for me was the “Nose to Tail” event, where all the unmentionable bits of animals were served up. I tried Dinakdakan, chopped beef tongue, braised oxtail and pig’s brain mousse, then Betamax, grilled chicken blood with Davoa dark chocolate and crispy chicken craw, all surprisingly tasty.

For the ultimate Filipino surprise, try Balut – a hard-boiled fertilised duck egg, which contains a developing embryo complete with beak and feathers. Don’t forget to add the dressing of chilli, onion and vinegar for that extra kick!

The 2018 Madrid Fusion Manila theme will be “Innovating Tradition”, the conference will take place between 19th to the 22nd April 2018. For more information visit their website at http://www.madridfusionmanila.com/.

Travel Essentials

Fly direct from London to Manila with Philippine Airlines.

For more information about the Phillipines, what to do and where to go, visit the national tourism board site - It's More Fun in the Phillipines

Madrid Fusion Manila
Philippines
http://www.madridfusionmanila.com/

Test Kitchen by Josh Boutwood
9780 Kamagong St. 
San Antonio Village, Makati City
Metro Manila
Philippines
https://www.thetestkitchen.ph/

Toyo Eatery by Jordy Navarra
2316 Chino Roces Ave, 
Makati, 1231 
Metro Manila
Philippines

Cibo by Margarita Forés
With 12 locations in the Philippines
http://www.cibo.ph/stores

Bale Dutung by Claude Tayag
Villa Gloria Subdivision, 
Angeles City, Pampanga
Philippines
http://baledutung.com/

Gallery Vask by Chele Gonzalez
5th Floor, Clipp Center 11th Avenue corner 39th Street Bonifacio Global City 1634 Taguig
http://www.galleryvask.com/