Caravela

We went to Caravela for the first time today. The restaurant is "hidden" on the High Street and at first glance looks like part of the George Hotel.

At 12:30 on an overcast Tuesday, we were the only people in there, which meant we had a good chance to chat to the owner - Portuguese born, but living in Crawley for over 20 years.

At 50 for two for a three course lunch, including soft drinks and service, it's not at the cheap end of Crawley's restaurants, but the food was exquisite.

The soups were done well, I had the Caldo Verde, but shared my wife's Vegetable - both were at the right temperature with an interesting blend. The chorizo in the Caldo Verde was a new soup experience for me!

For the main course, we both went for the fish Cataplana. A Cataplana is, apparantly, a traditional cooking vessel, and sure enough our food was brought to the table in a large one, before being taken to one side for serving into individual portions. It would be unfair to call Fish Cataplana a "fish stew", because it was head and shoulders above what the plain English description might suggest. A good discovery.

For pudding, we had the chocolate mousse and the Caravela Bombe (fried ice cream) respectively. Both were well done, and reassuringly home-made.

The ambience was nice, initially a little cold, but the owner quickly realised that we were looking chilly and turned off the overhead fan above us.

He was quite chatty, and very open about the fact that lunchtimes were completely dead - evenings are the time when the whole of Crawley's food scene livens up - full marks to him for bothering to open at lunch time for a single couple though - one of the other restaurants we'd tried to go to turned out to be just "6pm - late".