How much can you pay for a reasonable fish meal?  Well, we just paid 75 quid.  Not that the whole meal was great – the salad was old and tired, and the bread was inedible.  To be fair, it wasn`t badged with that price, it was more that the rest of us had things purporting to be meals that weren`t actually edible.  Al had a `veal steak` that was a normal steak, though about as tough as it was possible to imagine.  Sadly his knife blunted along the way so he had to abandon (though not by moving to the chips which weren`t actually cooked).  Kat and I had a monkfish stew `speciality` dish.  The speciality seems to be cooking fish for periods measured in weeks, until it is chemically indistinguishable from rubber.  And we had to wait 45 minutes for these delicacies.  An emergency McDonalds was necessary afterwards.

Portugal – great country, but the tourist traps are annoying.  And, really, is that a better economic proposition than running a reasonable restaurant and simply charging more?  That way we might conceivably go back there.

EDIT – it was called Restaurante Bar Pastelaria.  At least that’s what was on the canopy, though now I look at the photo is shows ‘Versailles’ that has been whited out (didn’t see that on the night) – so maybe too cheap even to buy the canopy!