3 hours ago
3
November 5, 2025 — 5:00am
It’s nice to feel like you’ve earned your lunch. All those calories you’re about to ingest over several hours of dining and drinking: it’s good to know that you’ve at least done something beforehand to justify it.
That’s why you don’t take a taxi to Gueyu Mar.
You could spend about 15 minutes travelling from Ribadesella, the nearest large town, to this legendary seaside restaurant in a car. Or, you could walk it, following the Camino del Norte, the northern route of the Camino de Santiago, for about four hours, along country roads and fire trails, over hills and across meadows, until you wander into Playa de Vega, and into one of Spain’s most enjoyable seafood restaurants.
What awaits is a feast you won’t readily forget. The tuna carpaccio here is nuts: the cross-section of an entire huge side of tuna is cut thin in one large slice, which takes in meat from the dark-red loin to the heavily marbled, light pink belly.
Tinned sardines – grilled and packed in olive oil on site – are served with tomatoes and raw onions and an emulsion of vinegar and the oil from the tin. And then chef Abel Alvarez’s grand finale, his imperador, or alfonsino, a deep-sea fish grilled over coals and served on its own to let the star shine.
All this and the Gueyu Mar wine list runs across three volumes, a huge stack of books that sits on your table and invites you to order premier cru chablis, or rare Corpinnat from Catalonia, or just a bottle of albariño from neighbouring Galicia that will set you back about €15 a bottle.
It takes hours to have a good lunch at Gueyu Mar. Three or four lazy, enjoyable hours in which you sit around a table with friends and breathe in the salty air and chat with the waiters and sip your drinks and feast on fine food, all the while knowing that you walked for four hours this morning so now you can do pretty much anything you want.
I’m here to tell you: this is how to travel. This is how to do things right. If you love to eat, and you want to make food a big part of your travel experience, then you need to be building your day around one major meal. And it’s lunch.
Stick with me here. Breakfast, we’re told, is the most important meal of the day, and sure that’s a great time to load up from the buffet and get set for the day. In many countries, particularly across Asia, you can get some amazing meals for breakfast.
A lot of Australians have also been conditioned to believe that dinner is the major meal of the day. You have something light(ish) for lunch, and do the bulk of your eating at night.
Therefore, if you’re going to plan a special meal, an event meal, on your travels, you will probably be looking for a dinner booking. But that’s a mistake.
Lunch is the best meal of the day. Lunch is when you want your events, your memorable moments, your big splash-outs. This is especially true if you’re in a country where lunch for locals is naturally the biggest meal of the day – anywhere around the Mediterranean, essentially – though it also works in other places.
Lunch gives you the chance to relax into the meal, knowing you have nowhere to be, that this is the event, that the rest of the day can just unfold as it likes while you sit there and enjoy your food and drink. It also gives you the chance to do something afterwards: take another walk to digest, or go for a short siesta, or if you’re really motivated, you could call into a museum or a gallery before everything closes.
And the views! Lunch gives you views. It gives you atmosphere and a sense of place. You find the restaurant in daylight hours. You take your seat in a place that might just have spectacular views or even narrow bucolic vistas, and you know where you are and ideally why you’re eating the things that are being placed in front of you.
Almost all of the best meals I’ve had while travelling have been lunches. Visiting Mil Centro, Peruvian chef Virgilio Martinez’s Andean extravaganza above an Incan ruin near Cusco, was incredible in the daylight hours. Dining at Asador Etxebarri in Spain’s Basque Country, and even roving the pintxos bars of nearby San Sebastian – these are most fun when done on a sunny lunchtime, when you can go home afterwards for a nap and still be up in time to head to the beach.
Long, lazy lunches in Victoria in the likes of Chauncy in Heathcote and Brae in Birregurra: perfection. Dinner just wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t have the atmosphere, it wouldn’t have the same pace.
This is how to travel if you want to centre food as your main attraction. Make lunch the star, the most important meal of the day. Add a little morning walk beforehand, and it even feels healthy.
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