Once in awhile, you'll visit a country and find an absolute gem of a restaurant that's so good it makes you visit more than once on the same trip. In my 9 years travelling across Europe, this is only my 3rd such restaurant. Such restaurants must fulfil certain key criteria: 1) great food, 2) great service that makes you feel like family and 3) an environment that's homely, non-pretentious and authentic to that country.

Casal de Penha certainly fulfilled these criterion, and more. This restaurant was only a 3 min walk from our hotel but we only stumbled upon it on our last night in Madeira, and by accident as well, since the restaurant we had intended to visit was closed. I call this serendipity.

In Madeira, steak and seafood are their specialties and Casal de Penha does both with distinction. For starters, we had the piri priri squid, which was fresh, spicy and duly whet our appetite. We also had probably the best Bolo do Caco (Madeiran garlic bread) on our trip, which tasted even better when dipped in the piri piri sauce. Following our starter, I had the Madeiran steak skewers and my wife had their signature pepper steak, which is made from 4 different local peppers. Our steaks were excellent, well grilled on the outside and perfectly medium rare on the inside. What surprised us the most given the quality of the meat was that both were fillet steaks. We would have believed it if they told us we were having a porterhouse! The somellier also recommended a wonderful Madeiran red to go with our food.

For dessert, we had a banana and orange juice flambe as well as a traditional almond cream dessert with chocolate sauce. The flambe is done table-side, which makes for quite a theatrical viewing. Pleasingly, it tasted as good as it looked. We capped off the meal with some complementary fortified Madeiran wine, wistful that we hadn't found this place sooner.

The next day, we duly turned up at Casal de Penha at 11.30am hoping to grab a quick lunch and thankfully it was already open. Our waiter from the night before, Cristiano (affectionately dubbed "CR1"), was pleasantly surprised to see us and greeted us with a same warmth as he did the night prior. The best part about this restaurant is that the staff are equally passionate about their food and will ensure you get what you came for. Upon telling Cristiano that we wanted seafood, he duly recommended several dishes (while ensuring they were witihin budget) and based on his recommendations the night before, we decided to trust him wholly.

For starters, we had the Bolo do Caco with limpets in garlic butter sauce and mussels cooked in traditional Madeiran style. Cristiano also asked the chef (who is also the owner of the restaurant) to prepare some of his secret recipe piri piri hot sauce as a bonus on the house. He suggested dipping our garlic bread into the limpets sauce, placing 1-2 limpets on the bread, layering some hot sauce and consuming in one bite. Even typing this is making my mouth water. It was a divine combination. The limpets and mussels were oh so fresh and the portions were generous. At 9 euros and 13 euros respectively, they were a steal.

The star of the show was the main course, which were the large king prawns that were caught earlier in the day. These were perfectly cooked and extra fresh, as you'd expect. This was slightly pricey, at 30 euros for 3 large prawns, but it was worth it. Cristiano even brought us extra bread on the house to go with the prawns. Paired with their special hot sauce, which enhanced the flavours rather than overwhlemed them, it was a symphony in our mouths.

We ended our meal with some Madeiran honey cake with vanilla ice cream. The cake was fluffy and the ice cream was rich - delicious. We ended with espresso and some fortified Madeiran wine, which really encapsulated our emotions in a nutshell - bittersweet - sad that we had to say goodbye to Madeira but glad to have found such a gem that we'd inevitably return to sometime in the near future.