How Ocean Restaurant Keeps Reinventing Portuguese Fine Dining

18.03.2024 - 13:49 / forbes.com

If someone opened a seafood restaurant, they might be tempted to call it Ocean. But in the hands of chef Hans Neuner, Portugal’s Michelin two-star Ocean is something far more ambitious than that.

At the restaurant, which overlooks the sea as the showplace of the lavish Vila Vita Parc resort in the Algarve, Neuner and his long-serving team certainly make good use of local fish and seafood. But they also explore the role that oceans have played in history—cultural and political, to be sure, but in this case, gastronomic as well.

It was the oceans that carried Portuguese navigators on their voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, and it’s still the oceans that connect people and cultures. And so, yes, while much of what arrives on the plates of Ocean is caught in the waters nearby, the idea of “ocean” is more than the creatures it contains.

It’s the connections, the intermingling, the growing and learning that come from traveling the world. Neuner was born in Austria and worked in old-school fine-dining kitchens there as a teenager. He learned discipline, rigor and technique, which still serve as a base for all the locality, seasonality and ethical considerations that have been added to everyone’s recipes in 2024.

After working in high-end gastronomy around the world, he transplanted himself in the Algarve in 2007. While Portugal has had a great deal of delicious food throughout its history, in the early 2000s, it was only beginning to write its fine-dining language—many ingredients still had to be imported from France and Spain. Neuner was one of the early authors. (A case can be made that foreigners who see things with fresh eyes can become some of the biggest champions of those things.)

Neuner was recruited to take over the kitchen of Ocean at Vila Vita Parc, a full-service, five-star resort near the center of the Algarve that’s been a standard-bearer for Portuguese luxury for more than three decades. The 203-room resort is spread over 54 acres of gardens and has 12 restaurants and 7 bars, but it was with Ocean that the owners and manager hoped to make the property’s mark on the culinary world.

The dining room is a fitting setting, with its ocean views, Murano glass chandeliers and collection of coral-shaped ceramics that appear to have been excavated from the sea. A macrame wall hanging incorporates subtly colored lights and shell patterns, a subtle commentary on the precarious health of the world’s oceans without any of the overt lecturing that has been creeping into fine dining lately. (Could the chefs of the world please knock it off with the edible plastic as commentary?)

Neuner quickly found his stride, earning his first Michelin star at Ocean in 2009 and the second in 2011.