About us

A guide written by two people who eat here

DiningOut is a yearly print guide to the best restaurants in the Algarve, and a website that keeps up with it between editions. Every place in it was chosen and revisited by the people who write the magazine. There are two of us.

Editor · Restaurants

Claire

Claire eats out four times a week and writes most of what you read here. She moved from Lyon to Lagoa in 2019, spent two seasons in a kitchen in Ferragudo to find out whether she should be writing about them at all, and decided she should.

She keeps the restaurant list, makes the second visits, and is the reason one of the three badges in this guide carries her name.

“If I would not send my mother there, it does not go in.”

Publisher · The print edition

Maria

Maria grew up in Olhão and knows which of the market stalls to trust in August. She runs the magazine itself: 196 pages, one printer in Loulé, and 140 pick-up points that all have to be visited in the same fortnight every spring.

She handles the venues that stock the guide, the restaurants that advertise in it, and the line between the two, which she is strict about.

“Nobody buys their way onto the list. They can buy a page at the back.”

Our criteria

How a place gets in

Four rules, unchanged since we took the title over. They are the whole editorial policy.

  1. 01

    We pay for what we eat

    Every meal, every time, including the ones we write nothing about.

  2. 02

    Nothing goes in on one visit

    A good Tuesday is not a restaurant. We go back, usually in a different season.

  3. 03

    Advertising sits apart from the list

    Pages at the front and back are for sale. Entries are not, and advertisers are told so first.

  4. 04

    Three labels, no more

    Claire’s Favourite, This Week’s Discovery, Locals Only. We have turned down every request for a fourth.

  • Claire’s Favourite
  • This Week’s Discovery
  • Locals Only

The title

Older than both of us

Test Magazine
test previous issue

DiningOut has been printed every spring since 2006. We bought it in 2025 from the couple who founded it, kept the name and the archive, and changed almost everything else: a new list, a drawn map, and one idea — that you choose a restaurant by the evening you want, not by the kind of food it serves.

Twenty editions are on the shelf behind the desk. All of them are on the site.

Talk to us

Tell us where we should eat

Restaurants, readers, hotels with a lobby table to fill — one of us answers everything, usually within two working days.

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