A guided walk through our syntropic food forest followed by a six-course tasting menu built from the day's harvest. €165 per guest, limited to 20, year-round on São Miguel.
We don't print menus. What ends up on the table during our Sunset Farm Experience depends on the weather, the season, and what our team harvested that afternoon. The dinner that follows the tour is a six-course tasting built around the day's pick — vegetables, fruit, and herbs that were still in the soil hours earlier, served at the table where the food forest is visible just beyond the garden.
The evening starts at 5 PM with a welcome mocktail — a fresh juice from the farm built around whatever fruit or vegetable came in that morning. From there, our Farm Manager leads an educational walk through the syntropic farming food forest. You'll see the cells where passionfruit, companion species, and soil-building plants grow together, and you'll come away understanding how a regenerative farm actually functions — not in the abstract, but in front of you, plant by plant.
The walk runs until around 6:30. It's not a guided tour in the polished sense — it's a working conversation about the land, the plants, and the slow process of building something that gets better every year.
"You eat at the end of the tour, but you start understanding the food the moment you step onto the farm."
When the walk ends, dinner is served at Casa Protea — outdoors on the garden patio in good weather, inside in the dining room when the weather turns. Either setting is intimate. The group is limited to 20 guests, so the meal feels closer to a private dinner than a restaurant service.
The format is a six-course tasting menu. Each course is built around what was harvested that day, so the menu changes constantly. Vegetables, fruit, herbs — all from our gardens and food forest, supplemented by cheese, bread, honey, and other ingredients from small São Miguel producers we work with. The kitchen's job is to get out of the way of the ingredients. When the food is this fresh, that's the whole craft.
This is also the only way to dine at VIVA Quinta. We're a working farm, not a restaurant open to the public — the Sunset Farm Experience is how we share our kitchen with anyone who wants to eat from our food forest.
The dinner is designed to stand on its own, but we offer two optional wine pairings for guests who want to make a fuller evening of it:
The Azorean pairing leans into the volcanic-soil wines from across the islands — distinctive, mineral-forward, and rarely served outside Portugal. The Premium Portuguese pairing reaches across the mainland for older bottles and producers worth knowing.
The Sunset Farm Experience with Farm-to-Table Dinner is €165 per guest and includes the welcome mocktail, the food forest tour, and the six-course tasting menu.
In the summer high season, the experience runs every night except Saturdays. The rest of the year, the schedule shifts with the season — check our reservations page for current availability.
The experience is open to both VIVA Quinta guests and non-staying visitors. Dinner concludes around 8 PM, which leaves the rest of the evening open. If you're staying with us, it's a short walk back to your house. If you're visiting, the drive home is along quiet roads under an Azorean sky — not a bad way to end a meal.
Reserve the Sunset Farm Experience – or subscribe to our YouTube channel to follow what's coming out of the kitchen and the food forest.