In Ribeira Grande, more specifically at Rua da Areia, no. 4, in the parish of Conceição, you’ll find Restaurante Monte Verde, a family restaurant run by Luís Alberto Sousa Cardoso since 1986.
Restaurante Monte Verde is known for its good charcoal-grilled fish, forkbeard fillets, seafood, and divine soup.
At the restaurant, we spoke to 63-year-old Luís Cardoso, who made a point of explaining and demonstrating how the forkbeard fillets are prepared there, making it clear that the dish is “only made with fresh fish and cutting the fillets is an important part of the process.”
Luís Cardoso, who works there with the same dedication as always, shares this with his wife, children, and grandchildren, who also work in the restaurant.

The knowledge of having been a fish vendor

Luís Cardoso was previously a fish peddler. Then, as he had a lot of free time, he thought about opening a restaurant to keep himself busy, and so he did. This is how Casa de Pasto Monte Verde came to be, in a smaller version, along with a bar. “At that time, our menu was also quite different, with dobrada dishes, stewed meat, octopus and some fish.”
Time passed, and Luís Cardoso stopped selling fish to focus more on Casa do Pasto Monte Verde. At the same time, he introduced more fish to the menu and stopped making the other dishes. By then, the family business was already known by the locals for bringing the best of the sea to the table. Once the facilities were improved, the Monte Verde Restaurant was born.
At first, some suppliers would leave their fish there. Still, sometimes Luís Cardoso would also pick it up from Lotaçor, which is not the case today because Restaurante Monte Verde works exclusively with Gil Mineiro and Peixaria Almeida. “They leave the fish here for me, depending on what I need,” he said.

Luís Cardoso fixes the fish

A unique feature of the Monte Verde Restaurant is that the fish is fixed by Luís Cardoso himself. What’s more, “the fish always comes fresh every day. When we sell a lot of fish, we get a lot. When we sell little, we get less because the freshness of the fish is essential to always have good quality.”
Restaurante Monte Verde specializes in charcoal-fired fish and forkbeard fillets, a house specialty with 37 years of history. “At the time, we had one fish or another, but we also had the forkbeard fillets,” which weren’t as well known as they are now. “Some customers already know it, but others don’t, and they come to like it. Many tourists and emigrants return and come here to eat the forkbeard fillets,” which are always made the same way, without bones, fried and accompanied by boiled potatoes, salad and tomato rice (sweet potatoes and yams).
Secrets? “The fish always has to be fresh, the fillets can’t be anything other than forkbeards and you have to know how to cook them”, with the wisdom of our interviewee’s wife and daughter”.

“The only thing that comes frozen is shrimp.”

Restaurante Monte Verde also works with shrimp and limpets from the Azores. “I don’t buy limpets from anywhere else but our own, but it can’t be frozen limpets and the only thing that comes frozen here is the shrimp, that’s all.”
Occasionally, there are “a few mackerel and lobsters, which we buy, but these days seafood is very expensive. Right, right, it’s always shrimp and limpet”.
With two rooms that can seat more than 90 people, the kitchen at Restaurant Monte Verde is open from 12:00 to 15:00 from Tuesday to Sunday, and the restaurant closes at 16:00. At dinner, the kitchen opens at 19:00 and closes at 22:00, and the waiter finishes at 23:00.
The Monte Verde Restaurant has many local customers who highly value the forkbeard fillets and some grilled fish. Luís Cardoso points out that “tourists prefer grilled fish.”
At the moment, more than half a dozen employees at the Monte Verde Restaurant, including his grandchildren, will help out after their studies.
With his life stabilized, Luís Cardoso just wants his children to be able to take over the business one day. One of his sons, Elson Cardoso, is already running the Monte Verde Bar, and now it’s up to his other two children, Carina and Flávio, to take over the reins of the business. This is a way of maintaining the restaurant’s tradition and identity throughout the generations.
Carina is the head chef, and Flávio is the head waiter at Restaurant Monte Verde, which is owned by her parents, Luís Cardoso and Conceição Moniz.
As it happens, Luís Cardoso has already said that he and his wife will never stop working there.

The fish soups: the starter for which the restaurant is known for

By the way, you should know that a lot of forkbeards enter the Monte Verde Restaurant every day to be prepared into fillets, where nothing is lost, and the head and a few pieces of fish meat are separated to make the delicious fish soups, the starter for which the restaurant is known.
The menu includes fillets of forkbeard, fried or boiled forkbeard, fried chicharros (mackerel) , fried/grilled boca negra, fried/grilled pitcher, fried/grilled grouper, fried rocaz, fried espada, fried/grilled peixão, grilled snapper, grilled cherne, grilled emperor, grilled lily, grilled coalfish, grilled alfonsim, (all trendy fish in the Azores) grilled mixed fish, fried mixed fish, Monte Verde tuna steak, grilled swordfish, fried/grilled yellowfin tuna, fried moray eel, fried/grilled sardines or squid. You name it!

Marco Sousa-journalist for Correio dos Açores – Natalino Viveiros, director

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Cultures Department (MCLL) as part of Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance)  at California State University, Fresno–PBBI thanks the sponsorship of the Luso-American Development Foundation from Lisbon, Portugal (FLAD)