Seafood and markets: how to eat the Algarve like you live here

The Algarve eats the way a coastline should: simply, seasonally, and with an almost stubborn refusal to overcomplicate good fish. The best meals here aren't in the resorts with the laminated photo menus — they're in the tascas a few streets back, where the catch is chalked on a board, the bread and olives arrive uninvited (you can wave them away), and the cooking is confident enough to be plain.

Learn three or four dishes and you can eat brilliantly for a week without repeating yourself. Here are the ones to know.

Cataplana is the regional showpiece — a clam-shaped copper pan that steams shellfish, fish, tomato, peppers and coriander into a single fragrant pot. It arrives sealed, opened at the table like a gift. Order it for two; it's a sharing dish and a meal in itself.

Then: amêijoas à bulhão pato, clams in garlic, olive oil and coriander with a hit of lemon — the dish that defines the coast. Grilled sardines in summer, eaten with your fingers off coarse bread. Cataplana's humbler cousin, arroz de marisco, a soupy seafood rice for a cold evening. And whatever whole fish is freshest, salted and thrown on the grill: dourada, robalo, the day's sardines.

Every town of any size has a mercado municipal, and the morning fish hall is the real one. Olhão's waterfront market is the region's best — two grand brick halls, one for fish, one for fruit and veg, busiest and freshest before 10am on a Saturday. Loulé's Moorish-revival market is the prettiest. Tavira's is small but serious.

Even if you're not cooking, go. Buy figs and almonds and a wedge of cheese for the beach, watch what the restaurant cooks are buying, and you'll know exactly what to order that evening. The market is the menu, a day ahead.

Don't sleep on Algarve wine. The inland hills around Lagoa and Silves turn out crisp, mineral whites built for shellfish and easy reds for the cooler months. Ask for the house white from the region rather than reaching for a vinho verde out of habit. Finish, always, with a bica — a short, sharp espresso — and, if you've room, a still-warm pastel de nata.