Chicken? Yes. Piri-Piri sauce? Yes. Chips? Yes. Salad? Yes. Something to drink?

You won’t spend too long browsing the menu at Restaurante Valdemar in Silves. That’s because, essentially, there isn’t one. Someone might be able to dig one up from somewhere out the back for you, but there’s basically an oral menu that consists of five simple questions. There isn’t much need for a menu either — everybody orders the same thing: piri-piri Chicken with chips and salad.

And what good piri-piri chicken it is. Some say it’s the best on the Algarve, better even than the churrasqueiras in Guia — the birthplace of piri-piri chicken. Whether that’s true or not is open to debate — and we’re going to be going back and forth between the restaurants in Guia and Valedmar’s to do extensive research — but regardless: Restaurante Valdemar does excellent piri-piri chicken. It’s juicy and flavoursome, the result of the chicken being continually dipped in the restaurant’s special piri-piri marinade. If it’s not the best, it’s definitely one of the best.

The menu isn’t the only thing that’s absent here: there’s also a lack of walls and a kitchen. Tucked into the side of the market wall, and with all of the food cooked on a grill in the nearby car park, Restaurante Valdemar is definitely what you’d call a hole in the wall restaurant. The atmosphere is vibrant and friendly, a mixture of local chicken aficionados and visiting tourists, all enjoying cooking at its most basic but also its best. Who needs walls, anyway?

Almost as good as the chicken is the price, which isn’t likely to blow anybody’s budget. For couvert (bread, Algarve carrots, olives, sardine paste etc.), chicken, salad, and chips, desert (oranges with dried figs), wine, and coffee expect to pay around €9 per person.