Terra Nostra

Terra Nostra is the grand dining room of the Terra Nostra Garden Hotel, the 1930s Art Deco estate set inside the Furnas caldera on São Miguel. It is the destination restaurant of the Azores, and it earns the title through a rare combination: a singular setting (the dining room opens onto the country's most important botanical gardens, planted in 1780 and home to sequoias, cycads and 600 varieties of camellia), and a kitchen that treats the island's raw ingredients with genuine reverence.

The house speciality is cozido das Furnas, the seven-hour geothermal stew cooked in a covered pot lowered into volcanic earth at the lakeside just across the valley. Served at Sunday lunch, it is everything regional cooking should be — beef shin, pork belly, chorizo, black pudding, cabbage and sweet potato, all softened by earth heat and eaten with a glass of Terras de Lava red. The à la carte menu at dinner turns more contemporary: local alfonsino with lemon verbena, Azorean beef aged in the hotel's own cellar, pineapple soufflé from the São Miguel glasshouses.

Service is the Relais & Châteaux standard — French-trained, Portuguese-warm, unshowy. Dress is smart resort, not formal. If you are in the Azores for one meal, this is the one. If you are proposing, walk down through the camellia gardens to the thermal pool at dusk first.

For a Proposal: the 1,200-acre thermal gardens, the 19th-century iron pool glowing amber at dusk, and a dining room that has hosted diplomats and lovers for nine decades. There is nowhere else on the island, or arguably in Portugal, with quite this sense of occasion. Book the window table facing the sequoia lawn.