Sucking Shells and Braising Bones: Eating Well in Lisbon

Baby Bird & PigWizard, Lisbon

How do you extend your European adventure, prolong the escape from reality, delay the inevitable return to the daily grind of go to work, go home, make dinner and do it all over again tomorrow, basically stretch your honeymoon to the greatest possible length?  Don’t run out of money!  This concept has to remain at the forefront of our consciousness at all times throughout this trip.  How do we remain thrifty and yet still fully experience our new locations to the best our wallets will allow?

"Two-Face Beans"

Nelson the Butcher

Our master plan for thrifty yet experiential in Lisbon, was to take full advantage of the kitchen in our flat and rely on the amazing local ingredients found in the Mercado de Ribeira and of course the fresh meat items from our new friend Nelson’s butcher shop.  In addition to his regular stock of meat (rabbit, quail, lamb, beef, farm chicken, pork, etc.), which he portioned to order, I might add, several days a week he also sold the beautiful flowers and produce grown on his farm including bok choi, lettuce, fava beans, squash, oranges, purple kale, and these unique dried beans whose Portuguese name translates in to English as "two-face beans". 

Breakfast: I made a giant Spanish tortilla with brown eggs from the local butcher shop, potatoes, onions and zucchini from Mercado de Ribeira.  Every morning we slathered it with chimmichurri made from parsley, cilantro, lemon, piri piri chilies, olive oil, etc. and ate it with a crust of whole grain bread from the corner bakery shop.  A couple of days we shook it up by melting a bit of cured goat’s milk cheese, also purchased from the local butcher.  This made for a quick and healthy yet delicious beginning to the day.  Oh yeah, and the four days worth of breakfast it provided cost about 4 euros in total.

Along the same lines, after walking around Lisbon all day, picking up ingredients along the way, we opted to relax in the flat with a bottle of wine or a few shots of Jonathan’s new favorite Portuguese liqueur made with wild cherries and cinnamon, Ginja.  Oh, the dinners that are born from fresh, exciting ingredients, a fluid idea of what time dinner should be served, and the enhanced creativity fueled by a touch of booze, which is necessary, I might add, if you expect a masterpiece without the use of any seasoning save salt, pepper, white wine vinegar, and piri piri sauce!  In all seriousness, we truly savored these leisurely evenings, balcony doors open to the warm Lisbon air, where our one and only mission of preparing and eating dinner lasted for hours of newlywed bliss. As the night air cooled, our tummies properly satisfied, the evenings of laughter and teasing turned to philosophical conversations and discussions of our dreams of opening a European style butcher shop/café.  By the end of the week, all the craziness and never enough time-ness of the last few months had completely melted away to just us newly married and very much in love little duo.

Mr. Farm Cock & Romano Beans

Ok, dry up!  Back to the food!  A few of said culinary delights included the leg and thigh of a farm cock from Nelson’s shop, bone in of course (we do not eat boneless chicks in our household), 100% pan roasted since we had not yet figured out how to use the oven (what kind of oven do you have to set the timer in order for it to work?), and served with a side of roasted potatoes (sprinkled with piri piri chili sauce in lieu of the holy grail (catsup) and Romano beans sautéed with red peppers and lemon zest.  Mr. Farm Cock, admittedly a new beast for me, while slightly tougher due to his free range frolicking, was might delicious in flavor; the salt and pepper merely enhance his natural chicken goodness.

Bezugo with Chimmichurri

Blistered & Salted Padron Peppers

Another Portuguese ingredient rich home cooked meal included a whole “bezugo”, a white bass-like fish purchased from the Mercado de Ribeira.   The lady fishmonger, with a halo of scales lining her brow, asked me if I wanted her to clean it for me and much to Jonathan’s displeasure, I declined.  Back at the flat, I drank some wine and supervised while Jonathan lined the small counter with mess-free plastic wrap and scaled and cleaned the fish.  I then sliced some of the amazingly juicy and sweet oranges, gifted to us by our buddy Nelson, and a lemon, and in a hot pan, infused the citrus flavor into already tasty olive oil.  Out came the slightly caramelized rinds and in went the bezugo, immediately sizzling and aromatic.  Flaky goodness served with a generous, drizzle of my famous chimmichurri and garnished with a bowl full of my absolute favorites: padrón peppers blistered in olive oil and tossed with a generous amount of sea salt.

So where does the experiencing the Lisboan cuisine and the aforementioned seafood smorgasbord fit in with our thrifty DYI meals and honeymoon extension plan?  Well, while we did breakfast and dinner at home, lunch was our meal on the town.  I have already described our snail and sardine feast.  Another lunch included gazpacho, “toasts” with melted brie, tomato, oregano and olive oil and a sangria like summer afternoon cocktail whose name our waiter pointed out rhymed with felice (happy) and then quipped, “The more (enter Portuguese word I can't remember) you have, the more felice you have!”  Turns out, he was right!

A week or so before we left California, Anthony Bourdain fortuitously chose Lisbon as the site of his new episode for his Travel Channel show “No Reservations”.   He talked about the traditional musical style of Fado, which reflects the regional attitude toward politics, loss and life in general.  He shot a few clips of a dark old bar that sold nothing but shots of delicious Ginga, thus the origin of Jonathan’s curiosity regarding the Portuguese cherry and cinnamon liqueur.  But, the segment that caught my eye and got me drooling like a mutt over a deer’s leg bone was Bourdain attacking a plate of conch shells with a tiny little instrument, digging the guts out of a crab shell and spreading them on toast, only to wash the meal down with a fried pork sandwich.  Like I said, the seafood was the most memorable aspect of my previous trip to Portugal and this scene of seafood carnage put me over the edge.  If we did nothing else but feast at O Ramiro while we were in Lisbon, that was ok by me.

As Jonathan no longer had his handy dandy iPhone in hand, it took us a couple of days to find the restaurant’s address.  I didn’t care.  By that time, the fish display at the Mercado de Ribeira, the snails and sardine meal, and the bezugo had whetted my appetite to the point that finding the restaurant had ultimately shifted from desire to obsession.  There was not a direct bus route or metro, and really, when you’re in a new city, why would you want to be underground?  As maps are always a little deceiving one way or another, we couldn’t tell exactly how far away the restaurant was from the flat so we decided to start out walking and just take a bus the rest of the way if we got tired.  So, we walked. 

Pounded Copper Still

Along the way we saw some cool stuff, like a traditional Portuguese sausage cooking device in which you fill the base with alcohol, set it on fire, and serve it table side while the flames lick the sausage!  If you can’t picture it, come to our house for dinner when we return!  We went into a hardware store that displayed pounded copper stills in the window.  Jonathan desperately wanted one so he could compare notes with a certain friend of ours who distills his own delicious rye.

After about an hour of walking, we stopped on a corner to consult the map.  Out of nowhere, a little Portuguese lady appeared and asked in English if we needed help finding our way.  We confirmed that we were headed in the right direction and she warned us to be careful as we were headed directly into the worst neighborhood in Lisbon.  Interesting that a restaurant of such presumably high caliber was located in the Lisboan projects.  Heeding the lady’s warning, I tightened my grip on my purse and Jonathan sharpened his eagle eye as we headed into what appeared to be the Lisboan China Town.  While weaving our way through the streets we did manage to evade several suspicious looking dudes before finding ourselves at the door of O Ramiro.  We had found it! 

It has been said that ultimately an experience is sometimes about the journey and not always about the destination.  While our journey was an eventful and educational one, judging by the display cases full of conch, clams, langoustines, crabs, goose neck barnacles, shrimp, lobster, etc., strategically placed facing the street in order to lure the chance passerby, I immediately knew that this would not be one of those journey beats destination experiences.  

Upon entering the busy restaurant, we were immediately led past more lobster and langoustine tanks to our table where the waiter handed us an iPad menu already set to English (how did he know?).  One glance and the exoskeleton and bivalve dominated menu (sorry, Chef Todd, you’ll have to live vicariously through us!), we immediately recognized the conquilhas (conch) with their multi-point shells, and the santola, the long legged spider crab that brought us here in the first place.  To round out the meal, we ordered the ameijoa à bulhão pato (clams in garlic) and the lagostim, the irresistible spiny clawed pale orange langoustine.

Since the prices on the menu were not by the plate, but by the kilo, we solicited our waiter for some help in ordering the correct portions for a satisfying meal (e.g. 300 grams of conch and 2 langoustines).  Quite satisfied with ourselves as masters of this seafood universe, we clinked glasses of chilled Quinta do Carmo, a moderately priced (€14) vinho de mesa branco (white table wine), and waited for our feast to arrive. 

And arrive it did!  But not before we were both armed with an arsenal of eating utensils: a hefty mallet and chopping block, a narrow long handled two pronged device, a tiny crochet hook looking tool, giant formidable shell cracking pliers, and of course, a knife and fork.  Out came the pão com manteiga, warm bread, crispy and soft at the same time, slathered in butter, shortly followed by the conch.  The tiny crochet hook was the obvious instrument of choice when attempting to get at the meat hidden deep inside the pointy conch shell, although I must admit, we were three quarters through the plate before fully mastering the art of extracting the long conch body in one piece.  Served cold, which in my mind was a surprising move, the meat of the sea snail was slightly firm, not to be confused with chewy, and tasted deliciously of the ocean, not to be confused with fishy.

Next came a steaming plate of clams, swimming in parsley and garlic laden broth.  The first clam went into my mouth and emitted an explosion of flavor.  The creaminess of a perfectly cooked clam, just the right amount of pungent yet sweet garlic, rounded off by a white wine and parsley broth…need I say more?  Even better yet was the spider crab, its insides removed, cooked in strange and devilish ways, only to be served in a bowl made from its own shell and served surrounded by its severed and steamed legs.  Ready for a surprise?  Also served cold.  I tell you, a scoop of cold crab guts spread on warm toast is like nothing your palate has ever experienced!  I mean seriously, the fact that O Ramiro has the balls to serve cold crab guts proves the superiority of flavor.  Not to mention it was arguably the best crab dish of our lives.

Next came dessert, and by dessert I mean two foot long pale orange spiny clawed beasts with  crayfish-like fan tails sitting side by side on a plate: the langoustine, also known as the Norway lobster or the Dublin Bay prawn.  With a crack (or two) of my hefty pliers, I dug a chunk of meat out of the very hard shell and placed it on my tongue.  As I chewed slowly, the delicate sweetness of the meat pervaded my senses.  This was unlike any shrimp, lobster, crayfish, any crustacean I had ever eaten!  It was sweet, rich, and simply boiled in what I romantically pictured as a bucket of sea water carried in with the morning catch.  As I found out later, these creatures, hailing from the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean and parts of the Mediterranean Sea, are traditionally eaten in Spain and Portugal only on special occasions, hence the price (approx. $20/ea).  Heck!  If a honeymoon lunch in Lisbon, Portugal to kick off a year plus of travel and adventure is not a special occasion, I don’t know what is!

As I was sucking the sweet juices from the head of the langoustine, the manager came to our table, took one look at the carnage, a mess of empty conch shells and crushed crustaceans, the juices dripping from both of our elbows, and said, “Impressive!  You two definitely know how to eat because there is not one bit of meat left on these plates!  Well done!”  Looking like idiots with our shell covered napkins tucked in our shirts, we beamed at each other with pride at what in PigWizard and Baby Bird land could not be construed as anything but the highest of compliments a patron can be given.  Having said that, when faced with one of the best meals of your life, who in their right mind wouldn’t extract every morsel from every crevice in every shell?

Now, you may thing I am being a little over the top in my lavish description of the flavor of a basic clam dish or a boiled crab.  Who hasn’t had the classic clam steamed in wine and garlic?  I have lived most of my life on the Monterey Peninsula and have had access to the freshest seafood prepared in a wide variety of ways by amazing chefs, thus the basis for my love of seafood.  There is however, a distinct difference between the pounds of seafood I have eaten at home and the kilos of seafood I am eating and will continue to eat on our trip, a difference which became more and more apparent as the meal progressed.  There was no butter, no oil, no fancy sauces and every dish was born of the simplest preparations.  Of course the key to cooking with simplicity, only using few ingredients to make superior meals, is first and foremost the quality of the products.  There was no need to add flavor, depth or richness to the meat through butter, oil or sauces, because these creatures, pulled from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, almost completely unadorned, just flat out taste better!   

After cleaning our hands with wipies, lips still tingling with seafood bliss, we figured we better sober up and cleanse our palates with a dessert of lime sorbet topped with a floater of vodka.  Perfect.  Three sips of espresso (cause who can resist real espresso?), paid our bill (equivalent to about $140), and we were homeward bound.  Before we could reach the door, the manager stopped us, shook both our hands and said, “We like people who know how to eat!  You come back anytime you want!”  That's us, PigWizard and Baby Bird, making friends and changing lives wherever we go!

Pork Shanks & Belly Chunks

Having admitted the cost of our lunch, you must be wondering what happened to the pledge of thrifty living and how did we managed to justify the equivalent of a $140 lunch?  In reality, the official “honeymoon lunch”, as we later deemed our O Ramiro experience, actually epitomizes our thrifty yet experiential concept.  Bite after bite, we continued to savor the simplicity and deliciousness of the new flavors and textures of these four shellfish dishes.  Bottom line, the meal was more than worth the price.  The thrifty counter balance?  After leaving O Ramiro, we walked the hour and a half back to our flat, bought some pork shanks and a few chunks of belly from Nelson the butcher, and slow cooked a fantastic meal of osso bucco and pasta.  A meal that I might add cost a total of 8 dollars and left us with enough food to share lunch the following day with our new found friend Nelson, and have another dinner for two! 

Thus ends our mini honeymoon trip to Lisbon, Portugal.  A few days before we had purchased our 10:30 p.m. train tickets that, after a 5 hour journey, would bring us to San Vicente de Alcantara, Spain, our first farm on what is hopefully a long list of HelpX farms that would love to host our skilled and able bodied selves.   

Adeus and obrigado, Portugal!

Up Next: Finca Los Tres Alcornoques, San Vicente del Alcántara, Spain