Recipefiesta

From the breezy dunes of Normandy to the dreamy lagoons of the Algarve, our writers choose their favourite places to eat and drink by the sea

The West Sussex village of Amberley, near Arundel, is easy to reach by train and offers great hiking in the national park, castles and a newly reopened pub with a focus on local food

Wisteria and clematis hang from weathered cottage walls. Tulips and pink apple blossom spill out of several gardens. Thatched animals decorate the rooftops. There’s a Norman church, a medieval castle and an 80-hectare (200-acre) nature reserve. Amberley is the kind of place people assume you can only reach by car, but the village has its own railway station with regular direct trains, along the scenic Arun Valley line, from Bognor, Horsham and London Victoria.

This spring, the Black Horse pub reopened in Amberley. The new owners are the gourmet Gladwin brothers, Oliver and Richard, returning to their Sussex roots near Nutbourne Vineyards. Having founded five Local & Wild restaurants in London, the Black Horse is their first country pub and first place with rooms.

Butcher’s shops and dive bars sit side by side in a district where you can swap the touristy beer halls of the city centre for raw creative energy

In the south-west of Munich, Schlachthofviertel is an area in flux; a jarring district that is home to a theatre, a techno club and a controversial active slaughterhouse.

This traditional neighbourhood ‘across the river’ is where the city’s creatives are heading as the centre heats up

Madrid’s current boomtown dynamics are driving the city centre way upmarket, pushing the average punter to outer barrios in search of cheaper rent. As seen in New York and elsewhere, the creative class is moving too – crossing the River Manzanares to open studios in the former factories and metalworks of Carabanchel. Now the city’s most populous district, this used to be a separate municipality, which was annexed to the capital in 1948 and built up into canyons of high-rise flats to house the postwar influx from the provinces, and later from Latin America.

After decades in the shadows, the residents of this historic quarter came together to launch local businesses and make the area an attractive proposition once more

My favourite way to enter Rione Sanità is by elevator: descending from a bridge into cobblestoned streets buzzing with mopeds and flanked by opulent but decaying 18th-century palazzi. Through the grand doorways of these once noble palaces are courtyards where bakers, butchers, cobblers and the odd contraband cigarette vendor do business.

This buzzy quarter is best enjoyed on one of the many tree-lined terraces, eating gourmet wraps, sipping bio wine and listening to live jazz

Named for its 19th-century neoclassical church, Notre-Dame du Mont was once a site where sailors who’d survived shipwrecks and storms made offerings of thanks. Now locals and visitors make a pilgrimage to this vibrant quarter for its restaurants, indie shops and street art. Voted Time Out’s coolest neighbourhood in the world in 2024, Notre-Dame du Mont has retained its laid-back charm while continuing to grow, stretching south on Rue de Lodi. Since December 2025, the church’s parvis has been pedestrianised. Removing the urban roar of scooters has returned the quarter to its village-like ambience – best enjoyed on one of the many tree-lined terraces.

It once housed the fanciest shops and restaurants in Greece’s capital city – then it crashed. Now the area is reborn as a vibrant, multicultural neighbourhood

After my father’s will banned me and my siblings from his funeral, I wrote a novel about some brothers and sisters stealing their dad in his coffin. The emotions were drawn from my painful experiences, but I invented the characters and the tragi-comic narrative in Stealing Dad. Despite growing up in England, I’ve lived in and written about Athens for 25 years, and it came naturally to create several Greek characters. Alekos is a wild sculptor who dies in London, and his daughter Iris (one of seven dispersed half-siblings) lives off Victoria Square – one of Athens’ most fascinating corners.

In the 1960s, Plateia Viktorias was a fashionable neighbourhood with the fanciest restaurants, shops and theatres. Townhouses from the interwar period were being demolished and Athenians were occupying the new six-storey apartment blocks so fast that construction dust and the constant drilling were the main problem. Today, through wrought-iron and glass doors, elegant, marble-lined halls reveal concierges’ desks and traces of a vanished bourgeois life.