TOM JACKSON60 The Times Magazine
soggy cod, white bread, overcooked potatoes,
plain cheese, sweet wine and cold custard”.
By disrespecting my own national cuisine,
I hoped to make clear that it was a joke,
a brotherly swipe, an admission of mutual
complicity in something less delicate than,
say, Italian cooking, and less nimble and zippy
than Vietnamese. I just thought a nice, big,
obviously tongue-in-cheek dismissal of it at
the top would be funny.
Portugal didn’t. There were letters to
The Times, calls from the embassy, questions
in parliament, sacks of hate mail... and
I ended up, like always, avoiding Nuno and his
restaurants, and all other Portuguese people,
forever afterwards, and wishing I had just
written something boring, so I could go about
my life as normal.
And that wish was redoubled when I
heard the chat about Nuno’s latest restaurant,
Lisboeta, a homage to his home town of
Lisbon, which was being heralded as an
“instant classic”, situated on Charlotte Street,
seconds from the door of my Fitzrovia office.
Dare I walk in? Might Nuno assault me?
Might all the other Portuguese chefs and diners
pummel me to death then salt me and store
me and cook me months later with potatoes?
Then again, I couldn’t bear to miss out on
one of the great London lunch venues of 2022,
so I reached out apologetically to Nuno via an
intermediary and received the following email:
“Dear Giles, I honestly got the joke and I still
laugh about it! You made it to the Portuguese
main media news (;-). It would be a pleasure to
see you at Lisboeta! Take good care NM Xx.”Eating out Giles Coren
am really a very nice person, most of
the time. About 90 per cent of the things
I write and say and do are extremely
pleasant. I’m generous with money,
kind to animals, give a fair bit to charity,
smile at strangers, help people with
heavy bags on the Tube, and the other
day when I pranged into a parked car
on the school run, I got out and left a note on
the windscreen with my name and number
on it. My actual name and number. Not just a
bit of paper with the words, “People think I’m
writing my name and number on this bit of
paper but I’m not – ha ha ha,” on it. And the
car’s owner got in touch that evening and I’m
paying her repairs, and that’s that.
But I do very occasionally write mean
and stupid things. Like when I went to review
Taberna do Mercado in July 2015, the popular
new restaurant from Nuno Mendes, the widely
fêted Portuguese chef behind Michelin-starred
Viajante and A-list hangout the Chiltern
Firehouse, and opened with: “Portuguese
cooking is the worst on earth.”
I mean, what a twat. I didn’t especially
mean it or think it. I didn’t go on to emphasise
the point, but rather to qualify and diminish
it, saying it was “what English cooking would
be if we had better weather” and revealing my
theory that the ancient alliance between our
two countries was “based on a mutual love ofI
‘I’ve changed my mind.
Portuguese food, as
everyone knows, is the
best food in the world’
Lisboeta