In Portuguese, it’s now known as Efeito Time Out, the “Time Out effect.” An iconic fresh market – for example, Lisbon’s Mercado da Ribeira – is renovated and rebranded, given a new life, albeit one that has little to do with the traditional Portuguese market. In 2014, the Time Out media brand took over control of more than half of Lisbon’s central market, renaming it Time Out Market Lisbon, and essentially turning it into a food hall, one that is largely frequented by tourists. On the market’s opposite side, the neat rows of produce, fish and meat vendors remain, but just barely. It would be easy to heap blame on the Time Out group, but the truth is, across Lisbon, fresh markets are dying.

There might be a menu at Bota Feijão, but we’ve never seen it. The only decision to make at this restaurant located just outside central Lisbon is whether or not you want a salad (the answer is yes) and what kind of wine to drink (the answer is sparkling). “We serve suckling pig,” says Pedro Pereira – the second generation in charge of Bota Feijão – by way of explanation. And it really is as simple as this. Pedro and his family spit-roast suckling pigs in-house, serving them with a couple simple but delicious sides. If they do have a menu, it’s not a very long one.

When Tanka Sapkota, originally from Nepal, arrived in Portugal 25 years ago, Lisbon was a very different city. There were no Nepalese restaurants and the only momo people knew of at that time was the King of Carnival (Rei Momo). Tanka says there were only four people from Nepal in the country, including him. “And now there are around 20,000,” he says, smiling. He first came to Lisbon for two weeks before deciding to move in 1996. Three years later, he opened his first restaurant. However, he didn’t start with a Nepalese restaurant, but with an Italian one.

“For me, it’s a grandma’s dish,” says Miguel Peres, without hesitation, when asked about his relationship with pastéis de massa tenra, a Lisbon specialty of deep-fried, palm-sized pastries filled with meat. “She would make a lot of them and freeze them, so we would always have them around. When there was a birthday or party, we would pull them out and fry them. We would take them to the beach in boxes. As kids, we would eat them with carrot rice and salad, using the pastries to scoop the rice.” Miguel is the chef-owner of Pigmeu, a pork-focused, head-to-tail restaurant in Lisbon, where pastéis de massa tenra can be found on the menu. He’s made some subtle updates to his grandma’s recipe, but the fundamentals remain intact: a thin, golden, pockmarked, crumbly pastry concealing a fine, tender, salty, savory pork filling.

Casa da Índia is not, despite the name, an Indian restaurant. The menu boasts a pretty standard repertoire of the type of hearty, meat-and-potatoes dishes one would associate with Portugal: grilled sardines, salt cod baked with cream, stewed fava beans. “This space used to be a warehouse for spices,” says Paulo Campos, Casa da Índia’s manager, when asked about the restaurant’s rather misleading name. “We’re close to the river, so this is where spices, coffee, tea and other things from India were stored. The owners wanted to retain this legacy, so they gave it this name.”

The annual Congresso dos Cozinheiros (the Congress of Cooks) returns to Lisbon this 25th and 25th of September, with two days of events, workshops and conferences. It’s one of the highlights of the year for professional chefs, but also an event open to all food and restaurant lovers. The theme of this year’s Congress is a particularly rich one: Conexão Africana – the African Connec-tion. The gathering is organized, as always, by Paulo Amado, a man who has battled and worked end-lessly for chefs and restaurants in Portugal. Paulo is a jack of all trades; an author, musician and songwriter. He is perhaps most widely known for Edições do Gosto, his multidisciplinary company dedicated to Portuguese gastronomy.

Alongside chef and restaurateur André Magalhães in his Lisbon restaurant Taberna da Rua das Flores, we stare down a rustic clay vessel piled with a mixture of steaming clams, fragrant cilantro and garlic, wedges of lemon…and not a whole lot more. As recommended by André (“It’s tastier if you use your hands”), we pinch the clams with our fingers and, after eating the meat, use the shells to scoop up the mixture of olive oil, clam broth, herbs and lemon juice that coats the bottom of the dish. It’s savory, rich, salty, tart and fragrant, and as with many Portuguese dishes, we’re left wondering how it’s possible that so much flavor came from so few ingredients.

Despite its name, Tabernáculo by Hernâni Miguel is not a church. It is a sanctuary and haven of sorts, though, a place where the local community gathers weekly for African and Portuguese food, wine and live music. Ministering to this congregation is Hernâni Miguel himself, one of the vibrant Bica neighborhood’s best-known characters. “Estás boa?” Miguel asks passersby on Rua de São Paulo as they pass his place. And “viva!” is the jovial response Miguel exchanges with old and new patrons who enter through the purple, crushed velvet curtains of Tabernáculo. The architecture of the restaurant reveals Roman-style archways and a 15th-century cave that doubled as a wine cellar in times past and which inspired the place’s name (Tabernáculo means tabernacle in Portuguese).

At the end of Rua da Voz do Operário, the main road that leads up to the hilltop of the previously sleepy Graça neighborhood, is a new, hip Lisbon kitchen that is reflecting the city’s growing hunger for great food and a good time. Damas, as the name indicates, is run by two women who have both previously worked in some of the city’s well-known food institutions, including Chapito. The restaurant, bar and club has been popular pretty much since it launched in 2015, thanks to its combination of knowledgeable chefs, classic and not-so-classic dishes done well, and a regular music program that ranges from punk to afro-beats.

On Travessa do Monte, one of the friendliest streets in Lisbon’s Graça neighborhood, natural wine flows as freely as conversation. We’ve come here, right by the arch and with a narrow view of the city and the river, to have a glass with Giulia Capaccioli and Massimiliano Bartoli, two Italians from Tuscany who met in Venice and now live in Lisbon. The pair’s bar, Vino Vero, which they opened in April 2019, is the spring that feeds this natural wine oasis. To fully understand the origins of this wine bar, we need to go back to Italy. There, in Tuscany, Massimiliano’s brother, Matteo, has a winery producing natural wine – that is, wine to which nothing is added or taken away.

Zé Paulo Rocha was born in September, 22 years ago. By December of that year, he was already sleeping on top of a chest freezer in his parents’ tasca, right behind Rossio, one of Lisbon’s main squares. Like so many tasca owners in the Portuguese capital, they had come to Lisbon from northern Portugal’s Minho region years before. As a young teenager, Zé Paulo used to help with the service while his mother cooked and his father ran the business behind the counter, the traditional family tasca format. His professional fate was sealed from the beginning.

The road from Nepal to Portugal might be a long one, but in recent years it has become surprisingly well trafficked. Since 2006, the Nepalese presence in Portugal has grown by approximately 400%, concentrated in particular in the metropolitan area of Lisbon, part of an Asian community that in relative terms is the fastest growing in the city. A tight-knit community, the Nepali immigrants often find work through compatriot networks, providing each other with mutual support as they settle into life in Portugal. The food industry in particular is an important gateway into local economic life, with Nepalese-run restaurants, groceries and mini-markets now dotting the Portuguese capital.

Lisbon’s communities from Portugal’s former colonies provide the strongest link to the country’s past, when it was the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west. Though integral elements of Lisbon life, these communities can sometimes be an invisible presence in their adopted land, pushed out to the periphery of the city. With our “Postcolonial Lisbon” series, CB hopes to bring these communities back into the center, looking at their cuisine, history and cultural life. In our five-installment  series, we look at Lisbon’s Mozambican, Goan, Brazilian, Angolan and Cape Verdean communities. Click below to read more.

On a narrow and, until recently, slightly forgotten street in Lisbon’s city center, a simple Cape Verdean eatery is holding its own. As one of the few tascas serving up African dishes in this part of town, Tambarina, with its dozen tables and keyboard and mics set up in the corner, bears testimony to this urban quarter’s historical connections to the people of Africa’s northwestern archipelago. Rua Poço dos Negros – a street whose name (poço means “pit” in Portuguese) reveals a disturbing history as a mass grave site for the bodies of enslaved people – is on the border of what until two decades ago was known as “the triangle.” This is an area extending to São Bento and which in the 1970s became home to a new group of migrant Cape Verdeans.

Those normally finding themselves craving Angolan flavors in central Lisbon head straight to Mouraria, the medieval downtown neighborhood that has experienced a conceptual conversion of its peripheral status into a landmark of cultural and culinary diversity. Despite it being the area with the highest density of Angolans in Lisbon’s city center, Angolan restaurants open and close at a rapid rate, with now-shuttered CB favorites Palanca Gigante and Shilabo’s falling prey to this trend. In the beginning, these restaurants were only popular among the Angolan community, but nowadays, due to the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, a new clientele is discovering them. Now that we can’t get the country’s iconic national dish, muamba, at Shilabo’s or Palanca Gigante, we head to Rato instead for a taste of Angola.