How to get a table at Zé Inácio in August

There is no trick. Worth saying first, because people arrive in August convinced there is a number that works or a name to drop, and there is not. Zé Inácio does not take reservations. What exists instead is a queue, and three ways of being at the right end of it.

Be there at seven

Seven o'clock is early, and in August early is the whole game. Turn up then and you will almost certainly sit down. It is not a clever tactic, it is just the difference between eating and waiting, and if you have children with you it is the entire answer. It is also the better hour, before the room gets loud.

Ask on the way past

The village is small enough that you will walk the door on your way to the beach. Stop and ask whether there is any chance of a table that evening. Nobody will promise you one, because they do not hold tables, but you will find out what kind of night it is going to be, and that is worth knowing before you plan the day around it.

Leave your name an hour early

If you want to eat at nine, walk over at eight and put your name down. It is the closest thing to a booking that exists here. You still wait, but you wait on a list instead of on hope.

Is it worth it

Yes. The ingredients are the point, and they are real ones, cooked the traditional way, with nothing done to them for the sake of a menu photograph. Octopus salad, grilled fish, calamari. It is where the village itself eats, and in a fishing town that is the only recommendation that has ever counted.

And outside August

Ignore all of it. For most of the year Porto Covo has more tables than people and you can walk in. This is a peak-season problem, roughly July through the third week of September, and it is the price of the village being good.

Before you go

Closed Wednesdays. The parish directory publishes lunch as 12h00 to 15h00 and dinner as 19h00 to 22h00, though those are its hours and not ours, so treat them as a guide. The number is 269 905 977, and it will not get you a table.