Pizzeria Casavostra — All in the Family

A Monday Night in October

There are few better measures of a restaurant's standing than how busy it is when it has no particular reason to be. We went on a Monday evening in October, well past the Algarve's high season, and found it completely full, inside and out.

That says something about its position in Almancil. Casavostra has been making pizza since 2003 and has built the sort of local following that does not evaporate when the summer visitors go home. More than two decades in, it is still somewhere people actively choose to spend an evening rather than somewhere they end up.

In an area with no shortage of expensive restaurants competing for the same diners, that is harder to achieve than it looks.

The Family Behind the Restaurant

The story starts seventeen years before the first pizza. In 1986, Teresa Cálem and João Louro, newly arrived in the Algarve, opened Alquatro — an atelier and decor shop at number 4 on the Almancil road, which is where the name comes from. It became one of the first serious design businesses in the region.

Casavostra arrived separately, in the summer of 2003, importing its concept from Casanova, the pizzeria beside Lux in Lisbon. The two ran in parallel until 2011, when the family converted part of the Alquatro showroom and moved the restaurant into it. That is why the dining room looks the way it does: the exposed metal and timber beams and the generous proportions are not a design decision made for a restaurant, they are what a furniture showroom looks like with tables in it. The design side now trades alongside it as Casavostra Home.

It is an unusual sequence for a pizzeria. Most restaurants hire a designer to give them an identity. Here the design business came first by a quarter of a century, and the restaurant moved into it.

You get a sense of that order of events while you wait. The shop sits to one side of reception, selling high-end clothing and homeware, so the design business is the first thing you see rather than a line in the restaurant's history. It explains the room you are about to walk into better than any amount of menu copy would.

What Comes Out of the Family's Own Land

The food follows the same logic. The Portuguese wines are produced exclusively on the founding families' own estates — the Cálems in the Douro, the Louros in the Alentejo — with a few Italian bottles alongside for anyone who wants the conventional pairing. We drank the white, which is the sort of thing you order out of curiosity and then order again. It is rare enough for a restaurant at this level to pour its owners' wine, and almost unheard of for a pizzeria.

The vegetables work the same way. What began as a plot behind the restaurant in 2003 is now a larger garden about a kilometre away, supplying most of the vegetables and herbs: rocket, courgettes, tomatoes, figs, avocados, and limes added recently, a fruit that would otherwise be imported. They have planted fruit trees to offset the restaurant's emissions.

None of that is announced loudly on the menu, which is to the family's credit. The pizzas are thin-crust and the Italian cooking around them is approachable rather than ambitious, and the kitchen has the sense not to oversell what it is doing.

Why It Earns Its Place

The Algarve has plenty of restaurants with handsome interiors, and plenty serving decent Italian food. Casavostra earns its place because those two things are connected by a family that has been in the region since 1986, and because the connection runs through the wine list and the vegetable garden rather than only through the furniture.

Our visit bore that out. On an ordinary Monday in October every table was taken, inside and out. The pizza was good without being the reason to come; the atmosphere, the room and the sense of a place that has been built rather than opened were what made the evening.

This is not where you go for the most ambitious cooking in the Algarve, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is where you go because the whole thing works, and because the family behind it has spent four decades making something recognisably their own.