The Times Magazine 61And so, in a trice, I felt much better – he
still loved me – and much worse, because
of how my own dickishness was thrown
into such sharp relief by his magnanimity.
I headed off the very next day, in the brisk
April sunshine, through the sexy town, all the
hot young kids dressing a bit summery at last,
feeling pretty damned Lisboan.
It is a beautiful spot for a restaurant.
The downstairs has a long eating bar and
lively open kitchen full of hairy blokes (none
hairier than Nuno, who looks like Aquaman’s
dad, with his long hair, tattooed forearms
and voluminous beard), hurling fire in the
way chefs do these days in slick modern
restaurants, but then as you go up to the
first and second floors, revealing itself to be
a gloriously fresh, light-filled eating space,
very southern European, very comfortable
and bright. Not the sort of room you expect
around here at all.
It used to be the famous Elena’s l’Etoile,
I realised, Melvyn Bragg’s favourite restaurant,
when downstairs was all Renoirish red velvet,
white linen and big mirrors, wigwammed
napkins, publishers, actors and hacks,
photographs, pretty ordinary food, lots of
wine, inappropriate knee-grabbing under the
table, very old Soho, and then upstairs a big
dingy dining room for private functions and
BBC piss-ups.
My friends and I were seated in the far
corner of that no longer dingy room, where
I threw open the huge window to bring even
more light and air and a little bit of diesel into
the room, and were looked after by a fantastic
young Brazilian waitress who brought us a
Lisboa negroni and two bloody alentejanos,
a variation on the “Mary” with light, freshly
squeezed tomato juice and a coarse tongue of
spiced salt smeared down one side of the glass.
With these we had impossibly sticky, well-
crusted sourdough with a dip you could easily
mistake for tarama, till you roll it around your
mouth and grasp that it is whipped pork fat
or unto (which I think is what the Portuguese
call “lardo”), studded with crunches of ham
and very delicious indeed with cold vodka
and tomato juice.
There was more unto, I think, sliced
polythene-thin and draped over warm Goan-
spiced pork pies called vindalho empadas
(“vindalho” as in “vindaloo”, I’m guessing),
so that they looked a little bit like shrink-
wrapped pasteis de nata, but felt in the mouth
like fresh little, top class, bacon quiches.
And then morcela and razor clams on toast,
so good we ordered another plateful while still
chewing the first lot, the clams cubed down and
left more or less raw so that their sweetness
and natural clamminess (both literal and
figurative) were not compromised, tumbling
playfully with the squelchy black pudding on
good greasy fingers of toast, under a tangle of
samphire and some shards of orange peel.
The bacalhau was good, topped with
shoestring fried potato, and the plumas de
porco preto were excellent: four little slices
of that juicy little end of the loin cut, charred
and glistening with fat but rare inside, in a
truly uplifting, intensely fruity red pepper
sauce. But best of all were some very fat,very dark green spears of asparagus, grilled
to quite a char in a thumping wild garlic
sauce that made me realise I had never had
asparagus with garlic before and then wonder
why. They’re great together.
So that was most of the “snacks” and
petiscos (small plates). For mains, we had
slow-cooked lamb shoulder in a red wine,
turnip-top and bread stew (chanfana) that
was much lighter than I had expected, and
perhaps less rich and punchy than I might
have wanted, but then altogether more
summery and digestible that way, as part
of a long lunch in springtime.
This left room for the majestic arroz de
marisco, full of razor clams chopped down
into the rice and then five big prawns that
I think must have been dropped raw into
the steaming rice not long before serving,
to retain that fruitlike sweetness and texture
that a raw prawn loses by stages, the more it
is cooked, until you get to the bland woolly
stage in which we in Britain sadly eat so
many of our prawns. The heads were served
separately for brain-sucking, full-on crunching
and swallowing, or shyly turning away from,
depending on your gung-honess with seafood.
(I am a sucker but not a cruncher and
swallower, for what it’s worth.)
And speaking of gung-honess, you really
have to order the abade de priscos for dessert,
an egg yolk and pork fat custard with port wine
caramel that grabs hold of your face from the
first mouthful and loudly calls all other custards
“pussies”. You may shudder and spit, you may
roll your eyes and call it life-changing. I doubt
there is a position in between.
Personally, I loved it all so much that
I went back the very next day for a walk-
in counter lunch with my wife and had the
wonderful mushroom acorda, a dish from
way beyond my ken, involving a bread sauce
holding half a dozen types of raw or barely
cooked wild and cultivated mushrooms, with
an egg yolk smashed over it, so that it was all
crunch and squeak and gentle earthy flavours
rather than the one-note MUSHROOM taste
you get if you cook your fungus too much,
or even at all. And then a brilliant evolution
of the steak tartare, very gently smoked
(reminding me a little of Simon Rogan’s
famous coal oil trick with raw meat) and
fatted with chourico.
So, look, long story short: Lisboeta is
a great restaurant, in a beautiful building,
with top-class service, serving very good
modern Portuguese food. And Portuguese
food, as everyone knows, is the best food
in the world. nLisboeta
30 Charlotte Street,
London W1 (020 3830
9888; lisboeta.co.uk)
Cooking 9
Service 9
Space 9
Score 9
Price £100/head