Editor’s Note: We are sorry to report that Delícias de Goa is closed.
The owners of Zuari and Delícias de Goa, two of the most traditional Goan restaurants in Lisbon, share not only similar backgrounds – both migrated from Goa to Mozambique before settling in Portugal – but also the dedication to keeping family traditions alive.
Delícias de Goa
Inside Delícias de Goa (Goa Delights), you can’t miss the many maps or references to Portuguese Goa on the walls, a deliberate decorating decision by José Paula Rodrigues, owner of this Goan restaurant in the Conde Redondo area, not far from central Marquês de Pombal.
“I’ve always wanted to share the huge Portuguese influence in Asia. As far as I know the Portuguese word caril existed before the word curry,” he said, showing us some maps and posters from the colonial times over a meal of puri bhaji (spicy potato cubes with small flat bread), bojés (fritters made with chickpea flour and onions), tiger prawns and some delicate beef samosas, all Goan specialties.
José Paula has owned this restaurant since 2008. Before that he had opened Nova Goa in the Campo Pequeno neighborhood and also worked at Velha Goa in Campo de Ourique (believed to be the first Goan restaurant in Lisbon) and at Mugri in S. Luiz Theatre (Chiado).
“To me, this [cuisine] only makes sense if you explain how the Portuguese went to Goa resulting in this food, which is the sum of the two cultures,” he continued.
The intertwined relationship between Portugal and Goa is something he knows quite a bit about: José Paula was the orderly for the last Governor of Portugal in Goa, General Vassalo e Silva, when the Indian army invaded the region in 1961. He was arrested and spent some time in jail. “It was really hard for me to see another flag being flown,” he said.
He was repatriated to Portugal in 1962, and the following year joined the Portuguese Army in Angola, where he stayed for two years. After returning to Lisbon, his military career brought him to Mozambique in 1967, although he soon took up work at a refinery in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo).
“I got married in Mozambique in 1967, she was a nurse for the Air Force and I was working in the oil refinery,” he recalled.
In 1975, when Mozambique became independent, most of the Goan community left the country. José was not an exception and returned to Portugal that year, and worked in a refinery in Sines. It was only later in his career that he began working at restaurants.
His current menu is littered with Goan classics like sarapatel, balchão (a pickled and spiced meat dish) and vindalho, a fusion of the Portuguese vinha d’alhos (meat with wine and garlic) with Indian spices.
According to José Paula, sarapatel is “probably the dish that requires the most work in Goan cuisine.” Blood and thinly chopped pork offal are cooked for quite a long time with numerous spices. It’s similar to the the Alentejo sarapatel, still served in southeast Portugal, and another dish in northern Portugal made with blood called sarrabulho.
The wine list here is excellent, especially considering that Goan food is not the easiest to pair with. For instance, at the suggestion of José Paula, the Anselmo Mendes wine (vinho verde) worked perfectly with the shrimp filled with spicy paste.
The restaurant is truly a family affair. His mom’s recipe book is an essential ingredient in the kitchen and serves as a reminder of how traditional cooking is often preserved. And now his son, Miguel, is working in the kitchen. “He is doing a great job,” José Paula proudly told us, a claim that we can confirm. Both father and son are so passionate that the love comes to the table in the form of wonderful Goan food.
Zuari
Orlando Rodrigues, 71 years old, has been at the helm of Zuari in the Lapa neighborhood for 40 years now.
In many ways, his journey from Goa to Portugal followed a familiar pattern: all of his family is from Goa, which was the only home he knew until 1961, when it was annexed by India. He didn’t feel confortable with the new order and moved to Mozambique. “I was Portuguese too and felt better there,” he explained.
In Mozambique he joined the military and then worked as the manager of Hotel D. Carlos in the city of Beira until 1976. At that point, working conditions became difficult and he decided to make his way to Portugal.
But here the situation was also complicated. “When I arrived in Lisbon the city was so full of retornados [the returnees, or refugees that fled from Angola and Mozambique after 1975] that I had to go all over the country to find a place to stay and work. I even slept on the beach in the Algarve,” he said.
He eventually settled in Ericeira (45 minutes north of Lisbon), where he opened a small place in 1977, but it was only profitable in the summer. “Then I started Zuari here,” he explained, “and thank God I always have a house full of people.”
Many regulars are partial to their shrimp curry or the fish curry, both of which require a lot of work and dedication. But the restaurant is perhaps most famous for its chamuças (samosas), which customers used to be able to get to go. “I had one person in my family doing them and she helped me when I started my business here. At one point we were doing 12,000 samosas a week, and I had seven people working on this,” Orlando said.
Due to a change in European health and safety laws that required deep-freezing of such snacks, a large and costly operation that he didn’t have the capacity for, Orlando closed the takeaway section. But he and his wife still make chamuças from the scratch for his small restaurant in Lapa. “It’s a lot of work, stretching the dough to get it thin,” he said. Their version is stuffed with beef (and plenty of it), and the end result is crunchy and delicious.
The Goan/Portuguese fusion can be seen in most dishes but vindalho represents probably the best celebration of both continents. “The dish here in Portugal was vinha d’alhos [a marinade of pork with wine and garlic] but the Portuguese started to use vinegar as there was not wine in Goa, and then the cinnamon, cloves and all the spices,” Orland explained. For the rest of the world, particularly in the United Kingdom, this dish became known as vindaloo, a hotter, fierier version where the chili peppers dominate all the flavors, and the sweet elegance of the cinnamon and cloves are lost.
Orlando is proud of his small restaurant, which is named after a river in Goa. A stream of regulars, neighbors, politicians, members of the parliament and chefs come to eat and converse with the chef.
His entire family toils away to keep the restaurant running, and that’s why they always take the month of August off, shuttering the restaurant’s doors. But sometimes Orlando mixes business with pleasure. “When I go to Goa on holidays I always bring spices for one or two years. I grind them here and they are completely different from the ones we find in packages,” he said.
His specialties also include homemade mango ice cream, the recipe for which a big food company tried to buy a few years back, and the difficult yet rewarding bebinca, a multi-layered cake that is made with 40 egg yolks and coconut milk. It takes a full day of work to bake the separate layers, in an uneven number of seven or nine. “It’s a traditional Goan dessert for Christmas/New Year’s Eve from a nun’s recipe,” he explained. This is fusion at its best: the convent baking tradition from Portugal, which features lots of egg yolks, reimagined using local ingredients such as coconut milk and nutmeg.
Similar to Delícias de Goa, Zuari is a family affair: Orlando told us that he was always very curious about what his mother was cooking. It must run in the family, as his daughter and his son help him in the restaurant.
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