How Portugal Became the Greatest Place to Eat Right Now
The best restaurant in Lisbon is not actually in Lisbon.It’s on the other side of the Tagus River in Cacilhas, a tiny port neighborhood you take a ferry to get to that is home to some abandoned factories and adorable feral cats who enjoy uninterrupted views of Lisbon’s very spectacular hills. There are tourists here but far fewer of them. And very few are at the best restaurant, which is a bodega-type café where a guy in a Corona hat who doesn’t speak English will ask you, “Sardinhas?” to which you will respond yes. And he will spend the next 20 minutes seasoning ten plump sardines with a wet chunky salt, grilling the sardines on a small charcoal grill on the sidewalk, asking other passersby the all-important question (“Sardinhas?”), until he disappears with the sardines inside the best restaurant in Lisbon that’s not quite in Lisbon. After several minutes he will return with a platter of grilled sardines topped with a few slices of boiled waxy potatoes, a salad of lettuce, onions, and what appear to be unripe tomatoes and which are in fact delicious and dressed with lemon and salt, and a beer if you were smart enough to ask for one, and it is amazing. There are much prettier places to eat grilled sardines in Lisbon; there are even much prettier places to eat grilled sardines right here in Cacilhas. But this place, with A Petisqueira (“The Snackery” or maybe “The Snack Shop”?) on its awning, is the best because I found it and I loved it.
But we’re not even in Lisbon, and the guy in the Corona hat has no idea that he is the chef at the best restaurant in the city, let alone the restaurant at the epicenter of one of the most exciting food trends, because his restaurant is totally unremarkable in Lisbon. I’ll bet that if somebody told him, “Hey, an American magazine says this is the best restaurant in Lisbon!” he would probably call to his wife who works the register and is always busting his balls about how they’ll pay rent, or how they’ll keep their daughter from marrying Carlinhos the Uber driver who has no interest in working at the store, and he’ll sit down in a chair next to the grill and say, “Do you hear that? The best!” Only he’ll say it in Portuguese and then he’ll take off his Corona hat to wipe his brow, flip the rack that is holding ten plump sardines for his buddies that came in for lunch, and get on with his day.lunch, and get on with his day.
We hadn’t come up with an answer before we got hungry again, so we went to Cantinho do Aziz. The chef and co-owner, Jeny Sulemange, is from Mozambique, and her tiny restaurant in the Mouraria neighborhood serves food that is influenced by a few of the countries that were colonized by the Portuguese Empire. And while it’s tempting to act like a food writer and suggest I know exactly the historical gastronomic path that brought palm oil and green plantains into the sensational shrimp stew called miamba wa macua, that would be reductive. But start a meal here with makorro, a chutney-like spread of mashed onions and cilantro, and a Kingfisher beer, and everything will start to make sense, and actually, maybe this is the best restaurant in Lisbon. Though I don’t think this is the food that Bon Appétit was talking about when they asked for this article, not because it isn’t amazing, but because even I would have noticed if Mozambican-Goan-influenced Portuguese food was having a Moment since that would frankly be one of the coolest things ever.
Clams with garlic sauce at Cervejaria RamiroA lot of people would tell you that the best restaurant in Lisbon is Cervejaria Ramiro. It’s like the Peter Luger of seafood restaurants, which is to say that it is touristy, boasts a menu of extremely simple seafood preparations, and is undeniably amazing. You are invited to get drunk while you wait a long time to be seated, and then once it’s your turn, you are hustled into a very brightly lit room with long communal tables where a waiter seems surprised that you don’t know what you want to eat, and then you are brought what look like cartoon versions of the most beautiful crustaceans and mollusks you’ve ever eaten in your life: tiny shrimp sizzling in a ton of olive oil with garlic threatening to get too dark; enormous shrimp, full of bright red meat; clams, clams, clams; and rock lobsters, like in the B-52s song! We ordered a boiled lobster, and it came to the table split open, steaming hot, and with a bottle of mayonnaise that tasted more exciting than mayonnaise. A rock lobster’s tail is full of meat, and there is a middle section about two inches long that is also full of meat, and the head has some guts and a lot more meat. It’s like a lobster but with extra lobster in it! This is the kind of seafood excitement that happens at Ramiro.
