Restaurants and Cafés

Over 40 years ago, in one of Évora’s typical narrow streets, intra muros, a tavern was opened and quickly gained fame due to the quality of the appetisers prepared by the cook and lady of the establishment, Olívia Prates. It made such rapid progress that it soon became a restaurant and came to be a gastronomic reference of both the city of Évora and of Alentejo. The facilities are an example of simplicity and good taste: small front dining room with a round table, display cases with conventual desserts and wines, a counter, an open kitchen and next to it a more spacious, albeit cosy, dining room. One feels so much at home here that there is a feeling of not being in a restaurant at all but in the Prates family’s home. 

The cuisine is full of homely flavours with top-quality produce, such as fresh fish from the sea. The fritters come from the time of the appetisers, as do the scrambled eggs with wild asparagus, chicken pies, mushrooms (during the season, also silarcas or brown mushrooms and truffles), crépine crackling, Alentejo pork tenderloin sausage, Serpa Cheese PDO and Évora Cheese PDO, in a long and appetising list of starters. There is another long list of main dishes: by way of fish there is dogfish soup and sea bass soup, old-fashioned bacalhau rice and grilled sole with clam rice and coriander; by way of meat there is oven-roasted Alentejo pork cheeks and Alentejo pork with clams; by way of game there is hare rice and stewed partridge with savoy cabbage. Desserts include conventual and regional desserts: fidalgo, pão de rala, sericaia, torrão real a sweet with almond, sugar, eggs and cream, among others, also made by the hands of Dona Olívia, hands imbued with magic. There is an excellent selection of wines, 90 per cent from Alentejo. Service attentive and friendly!