Faro, Portugal, March 13, 2026 (Lusa) - The lifestyle, quality of produce and climate are attracting more and more foreign chefs to Faro, who choose to settle in the city, combining local ingredients with international cuisine.
In a city where tourism developed later than in other parts of the Algarve, international restaurants were limited a decade ago to pizzerias and Chinese food, a scenario that has been changing, with the growth of more sophisticated restaurants focused on seasonal menus.
With the increase in the number of tourists, the municipality of Faro also began to have more restaurants: while in 2014 it had 141 restaurants registered as traditional (with table service), by 2024 that number had increased to 221, according to data provided to Lusa by the National Statistics Institute (INE).
Arriving in Portugal from across the Atlantic in 2004, Argentine Josefina Cardeza first settled in Lisbon, where she had two restaurants, but at the end of 2019, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, she opened Los Locos in Faro.
Despite the initial difficulties, ‘Ju’, as she is known, has no doubt that, after the pandemic, the city benefited from a turnaround: it began to open up more to tourism and many new restaurants sprang up, encouraged by the increase in visitors.
With a small space, the 50-year-old businesswoman does not deny that if she had opened a restaurant in Vilamoura or Almancil it would have been easier, as the people of Faro are still learning to develop a gastronomic culture, but it is precisely this challenge that inspires her.
‘It gives me pleasure that people have new experiences,’ she says, emphasising that the restaurant's concept blends with her personality: ‘it's like eating at my house and telling stories. Everything here tells a story,’ she says.
A few years later, won over by the climate, quality of life and raw materials he found in the Algarve, Sean Marsh decided to convert an old seafood restaurant in Faro - a city with which he already had an emotional connection - into a “bistro”, and thus ATO was born.
The American, now 40, moved to Europe in 2011 and chose Faro as his home, explaining that if he had a restaurant in Lisbon, he would have to ‘be open for lunch and dinner, seven days a week, to be able to pay the rent’.
So he opted to focus on a smaller market because he believes it is ‘riskier’ to open businesses in larger cities: ‘I prefer to be the captain of a smaller ship,’ jokes the chef, who opened the restaurant in 2022.
In the same year, Sky Visser opened Céu, a restaurant that combines Asian and South American cuisine, inspired by the flavours he has always experienced: the son of a Dutch father and Indonesian mother, he was born and raised in Curaçao, in the Caribbean.
Now 27, the chef came to the Algarve, partly influenced by his parents, who moved to the region when they retired, and he quickly fell in love with the lifestyle, mild winters, and the quality of the produce.
"I needed a place that wasn't too cold, with a calmer lifestyle. Faro has a lot of potential, it's almost a forgotten city, because the tourism boom arrived here later than in other parts of the Algarve, which was good for the city," he says.
Although the Algarve's capital is the most populous city in the district, for a long time its airport served only as a gateway for thousands of tourists.
The first hostel in the city opened in 2011, and it was not until 2021 that Faro gained its first five-star hotel.
This year, for the first time, a restaurant in Faro - Alameda, run by chef Rui Sequeira - was awarded a star by the Michelin Guide Portugal 2026, which distinguishes “high-level cuisine, worth stopping for”.
MAD/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
