“If the product isn’t great, we simply don’t serve it,” says Alberto Domingos, founder of D’Berto, a restaurant that has become something of a sanctuary for fish and shellfish in the small fishing village of O Grove, in Galicia. For a chef cooking on one of Europe’s most biodiverse stretches of coast, that’s not a difficult promise to keep. The lush region is shaped by more than a dozen fjord-like inlets known as rías, where the Atlantic cuts inland through forests, sandy beaches, and small farms, creating one of Spain’s most striking coastlines—and one of its richest marine ecosystems.
“I travel all over the world and have eaten some extraordinary fish and shellfish,” Domingos says. “But the more I travel, the more convinced I become that Galicia is the world’s greatest seafood region.” That’s precisely what allows him to offer a menu that runs from cockles to spider crab, from prawns of every size to shellfish found almost nowhere else, like the tiny tallarina, whose pale, triangular shell hides a delicate flavor somewhere between a Manila clam and a cockle.
Domingos, or simply Berto, as he’s known to customers and suppliers, says the restaurant has followed the same philosophy ever since he opened it with his mother, Lola, in August 1989, on the day he turned 20. “We buy the very best seafood, always in season and at its peak, and then we try not to ruin it. The idea is simply to show the product exactly as it is, without disguises.”
