Restaurants

Smart dining

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Raposo

Do you want to know a secret?  Do you promise not to tell? Raposo, a neighborhood restaurant in Lisbon, serves wonderful food for a modest price. They use the freshest ingredients prepared with no shortcuts and offer a wine list that perfectly complements the flavors of Portuguese cuisine. You can dine on delicious prosciutto, fragrant clams, cuttlefish with ink, fish rice with monk fish liver, and many other delicacies.

Raposo means fox, an animal with a reputation for being smart. A female fox is the hero of the popular book “The Romance of the Fox,” written by author Aquilino Ribeiro in 1924 as a Christmas gift for his son. It chronicles the adventures of a fox who always ends up feeling happy with her choices. And that’s very much how we feel dining at Raposo.

Raposo is on Rua Passos Manuel, 60, Lisbon, tel. 21-353-1059. It closes on Sundays.

Belcanto’s philosophy

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Belcanto2

Georg Friedrich Hegel described the evolution of human ideas as involving a thesis, followed by an antithesis, and then by a synthesis that reconciles the two. Believe it or not, these concepts are useful to explain the cuisine of Belcanto, a fantastic Lisbon restaurant owned by chef José Avillez.

The modernist cuisine of restaurants like elBulli is the antithesis of traditional Portuguese cooking. Avillez combines the two in a delicious synthesis that is both familiar and surprising. He serves olives bursting with flavor, golden eggs, seafood immersed in the smell of the sea, manta rays transformed into Pollock paintings.

The Michelin inspectors were so impressed with Avillez’s culinary dialectic that they awarded Belcanto a star. We suspect Hegel would agree.

Belcanto is located at Largo do São Carlos in Lisbon, tel. 21-342-0607.

A fisherman’s place

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Tasca do Joel-F

Fishermen have a hard life. They go out in the dark, defying the waves to cast their nets on a uncertain sea. On good nights, their boats return full of fish, pursued by seagulls looking for a free meal.

In Peniche, fishermen used to celebrate a good catch in a shack where they cooked fish and vegetables in a makeshift oven. Their food was better than anything served in a royal banquet because it was prepared with the freshest, greatest ingredients that nature has to offer. So, every meal turned into a celebration.

Over time, this shack was renovated and converted into a restaurant called Tasca do Joel. Gourmets flock to its out-of-the-way location, knowing that they’ll find something special: great ingredients that shine through simple, traditional preparations paired with the best Portuguese wines. And the same feeling of celebration that once gathered Peniche fishermen around a rustic oven.

Tasca do Joel is located on Rua do Lapadusso, 73, Peniche. Tel. 262 782 945. Email: tascadojoel@gmail.com. Click here for their web site.

Pizzaria Lisboa

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Pizzaria LisboaChef José Avillez can do it all. At Belcanto he showcases avant-garde cuisine that is deliciously original. At Cantinho do Avillez he serves inventive bistro food. Now he opened a pizzeria!

At Pizzaria Lisboa Avillez uses the Italian pizza as a canvas to showcase ingredients and inspiration that are Portuguese. The restaurant feels as if it’s always been there, serving as meeting point for groups of friends.

The service is great. We asked for a pizza degustacion, a sequence of different pizzas cut into slices. Our server replied: what a great idea, of course we’ll do it! And so we tried pizza Chiado, Figueira, 28, Comércio, and Caravela.

Not once did we wish we were in Naples or Rome. Instead, we went out into the warm night feeling lucky to be in Lisbon.

Pizzaria Lisboa is located at Rua dos Duques de Bragança, 5H, tel. 21-155-4945. Reservations are a must. Click here for their web site.

DOC & DOP

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DOP

The rustic food of Portugal is made of elemental aromas and deeply satisfying flavors. It is a cuisine of humble people; fishermen, shepherds, and farmers, who liked food that nourishes the body. In contrast, the French culinary tradition pioneered by Marie-Antoine Carême is all refinement and beauty. It is a cuisine of kings and queens who loved to feast their eyes as much as feed their belly.

Rui Paula, a Portuguese chef, spent two decades marrying these two traditions. At DOP, his restaurant in Oporto, he serves country food cooked with palatial elegance. DOC, his restaurant in Amarante, offers a similar menu. Here, the dining experience is heightened by the serene beauty of the location, on the margins of the Douro river.

If you’re traveling in the north of Portugal, don’t miss the opportunity to try these restaurants. They’ll satisfy your body and soul.

Click here for Rui Paula’s website. DOP is located at Palácio das Artes, Largo de S. Domingos, 18, Porto, tel. 22 20 14 313, email dop@ruipaula.com. DOC is located at Estrada Nacional 222, Folgosa, Armamar, tel. 254 858 123, email doc@ruipaula.com.

Why the British don’t eat salted cod

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CodfishCarpaccioF

Some British guidebooks tell their readers that eating salted cod is a strange Portuguese custom that they should avoid. There’s an historical reason for this point of view.  When Henry V married Catherine de Valois in 1420, England was in the midst of the One Hundred Years’ War. Perhaps for this reason, the royal couple had a frugal wedding feast. The 600 guests ate boiled salted cod served on slices of stale bread. The meal was so bad that the British have avoided salted cod ever since.

Portuguese restaurants offer many codfish preparations. If you’re a salted cod neophyte, we suggest that you start with something simple: codfish carpaccio. The codfish is sliced razor thin and combined with an infusion of garlic and olive oil.

You can taste a great version of this preparation at Mãe d’Água, a wonderful restaurant in Bombarral near Lisbon. Imagine how different British cuisine would be if Mãe d’Água had catered Henry V’s wedding.

Mãe d’Água is in Sobral do Parelhão, Bombarral, Rua 13 de Maio 26, 2540-467 Carvalhal, tel.262 605 408, email geral@restaurantemaedagua.com. Click here for their website and here for our post on the restaurant.

Portuguese fast food

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H3

Portuguese cuisine is definitely slow food. You have to wait for the fish to grill, the clams to open, the meat to roast, or the shrimp to cook. If you’re in a hurry, Portuguese cafés offer a wide array of finger foods to eat on the go: tasty codfish cakes (bolos de bacalhau), delicious small pies (empadas), crunchy paninis (tostas mistas), and much more.

But, if you’re in need of something quick and more substantial, try a Portuguese hamburger chain called H3. They cook to order delicious hamburgers made with great ingredients. Start with the wonderful “croquetes de alheira” as a appetizer. Then, choose one of the many burger configurations, with toppings ranging from mushrooms to foie gras. You’ll see why this fast-food chain is growing so fast.

Click here for the H3 website (choose “onde” to see a list of locations). 

A friendly restaurant

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Salsa&Coentros

The Portuguese do not like to divulge their favorite neighborhood restaurants, so we’re violating social norms by telling you about Salsa & Coentros (parsley and coriander). It is a delightful restaurant in Lisbon’s Alvalade neighborhood which serves food from the Alentejo and Trás-os-Montes provinces.

Dining at Salsa & Coentros is like visiting a friend who makes wonderful meals with local ingredients such as míscaros (wild mushrooms), cação (dogfish), partridges, wild asparagus, black pig, and fresh octopus.

If you become a regular visitor to Portugal, you’re likely to meet friends who are great home cooks. Until then, you can enjoy the traditional cuisine of Portugal at Salsa & Coentros.

Salsa e Coentros is located at Rua Coronel Marques Leitão, n. 12, Lisbon. Tel. 218410990. 

A supreme chicken

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One of the simple pleasures of Portuguese cuisine is roasted chicken with piri-piri, a spicy sauce made with peppers that came originally from Africa.

Frango da Guia, a small roasted chicken, is very popular in the Algarve. But the best roasted chicken we have ever had is from Frango Saloio, a tiny take-out place in the municipal market of the town of Lourinhã, 70 km north of Lisbon. You see no tourists there, only locals who wait while their chicken is cooked to perfection over red-hot coals. Lines can be long during the Summer, so please don’t tell anyone about this place!

Frango Saloio is located in Mercado Municipal, Loja 2, Lourinhã, tel. 917 272 385.

Great traditional cuisine in Oporto

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Looks can be deceiving. Adega S. Nicolau, a restaurant in the Ribeira area of Oporto, has no celebrity chef or design furniture. But it serves amazing food: grilled fish, fried sardines, roasted codfish, fried octopus, and much more. The star of the menu is the “posta de vitela arouquesa” a steak of veal from Arouca seared to perfection, the best we have ever had.

Everything on the menu follows traditional recipes, but the food is hard to imitate. It takes enormous confidence to trust the quality of the ingredients and let them shine through simple preparations. It is this confidence that Adega S. Nicolau has been building since 1930.

Adega S. Nicolau, R. São Nicolau, 1, Ribeira, Oporto. Tel. 222-008-232.