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Editor’s Note: Though integral elements of Lisbon life, communities from Portugal’s former colonies can sometimes be an invisible presence in their adopted land, pushed out to the periphery. With our “Postcolonial Lisbon” series, CB hopes to bring these communities back into the center, looking at their cuisine, history and cultural life. In this installment, we dive into Lisbon’s Mozambican community.

While the number of Mozambicans in Lisbon may be small, the city is blessed with several delightful restaurants serving the food of Mozambique – one of them even a neighborhood landmark.

Cantinho do Aziz: The Pioneer

Despite the relative discretion of the community in the Portuguese capital, one of Lisbon’s most well-known restaurants is actually Mozambican. Cantinho do Aziz opened almost 40 years ago along a narrow path in Mouraria. Since then, everything around it has changed, including the customers – but its kitchen has pretty much stayed the same.

Mr. Aziz, the founder, moved from the north of Mozambique to Lisbon at the beginning of the 1980s and found work as a waiter at this same spot, which was at that time a low-key restaurant managed by a French couple. When they left, Aziz took over, turning it into what was likely the first Mozambican food house in the city. After his wife and three children reached him, it became a family business.

“He was an icon in the neighborhood, due to his congeniality, hospitality and cooking skills,” says his daughter Chena, now managing the restaurant. The outdoor terrace, which takes over the adjacent alley, is decorated with old photographs of the family – just one indication of how Cantinho do Aziz grew over time into a local legend. Family members are now continuing the legacy with a new restaurant in the slightly less sunny city of Leeds, in the U.K.

Chena describes their cuisine as Indo-African, with sauces and curries similar to south India but with less spice – the fragrant bases of their dishes combines coriander, cumin, saffron, coconut and peanut. The menu is rich with curry dishes, with each sauce prepared early in the morning and the basmati rice, the usual accompaniment, boiled in homemade coconut water. The water is prepared by grating coconut into very hot water, which is later squeezed and filtered. A similar process is used for making peanut milk. “We don’t use preservatives, everything is made from scratch with love and experience,” Chena says. “That’s why customers always come back; including the comeon [Lisbon slang for tourists/foreigners] who sometimes eat here every day until they leave.”

Crab curry is one of the star dishes, as well as lamb chacuti – an ancient dish of pre-Portuguese Goan cuisine, spiced with ingredients from the west Indian Konkan coast such as poppy seeds, coconut, large dried red chile and tamarind. These two delicious plates, like many others at Cantinho de Aziz, have a strong Goan influence – converted Catholic Goans were encouraged by the colonial authorities to migrate to Mozambique during the 19th century.

But despite the South Asian influence, almost all the ingredients used in the Aziz kitchen come from Mozambique. The Malagueta chile pepper is used in their unique piri-piri sauce called sacana (literally translated as “bastard”); we recommend a cold bottle of Mozambican beer to counteract the heat.

Roda Viva: South Central Mozambique Meets Lisbon

Cantinho do Aziz is not the only great Mozambican restaurant in Lisbon. Located in another small alleyway, this time in Alfama, Roda Viva is an excellent option, particularly for vegetarians. It’s the project of Octavio Chamba, a Mozambican chef and anthropologist with a passion for percussion who moved to Lisbon 15 years ago to study ethnomusicology.

He unexpectedly ended up with this cute and tiny eatery in the capital’s oldest district and decided to devise a menu according to his home region of south central Mozambique – the classic ingredients being coconut, peanut, yucca and corn. Dishes such as makofo (cabbage), nhangana (nhemba bean leaves with coconut and peanut) and the prawn-based matapah are hard to find elsewhere in the city.

Though shipping containers loaded with Mozambican products habitually arrive to Portuguese ports, there are several limitations to any Mozambican restaurant menu, as many recipes contain vegetables and leaves banned by European regulations. In spite of that, downing some Laurentina (Mozambique’s best beer) with Octavio and listening to his stories of the rich Mozambican cultural history is as enjoyable as the food itself.

Read more about the Mozambican community and history in Lisbon – as well as one more spot to get a taste of Mozambique – in the dropdown below.

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Published on June 27, 2022

Go Deeper

Learn more about the history of the Mozambican community in Lisbon

Until 1960, there were many more Portuguese people living in Mozambique than vice versa. Around 80,000 were settled there, many because of the Salazar regime’s encouragement of citizens to migrate to its southeast African colony as part of a poverty-reduction program for Lisbon.
The first wave of migration from Mozambique to Portugal took place prior to the 1974 Lusaka Accord, the precursor to Mozambican independence, although the details are patchy. A second wave occurred during the violent 1977-1992 Mozambican Civil War, in which a million people died and 5 million more displaced. This already massive crisis was exacerbated by floods in the 1970s and droughts in the 1980s.
The third phase took place in the late 1990s, with many families looking to reunite. This period also saw many students coming to the former imperial capital to study at its universities. One of their more well-known predecessors is the late painter and poet Malangatana Ngwenya, who moved to Lisbon to study engraving and ceramics in the 1970s. He later campaigned for peace from his home country; his moving artworks depict the suffering and struggles of a troubled nation in astonishing color palettes.
Nowadays, there are around 7,000 people of Mozambican nationality living in Lisbon, 600 or so of them students. Despite the fact that this group is one of the most representative migrant communities from the PALOP (Portuguese-speaking African countries) group in absolute terms, there is little marking their presence in the city institutionally.

Learn more about Mozambican cultural spots in Lisbon
Lisbon doesn’t have an official venue or association supporting or celebrating the Mozambican community and its culture, but there are several groups that organize events in different venues, such as OMM – Organização da Mulher Moçambicana, whose activities are aimed to promote women’s rights and sometimes include solidarity dinners – and the AAM – Associação dos Amigos de Moçambique, which is struggling to get a venue to develop their social aid projects and communal activities.

One of the venues that often hosts such events is Casa Mocambo. Located on a steep residential road just east of the Graça neighborhood, it is spread out on two floors; the café and restaurant on the ground floor offer fusion Portuguese-PALOP food, with African-focused cultural events (including concerts, performances and poetry) taking place in the basement. The venue exhibited the work of Malenga, a famous Mozambican plastic artist, to much fanfare.
Ana Mafalda Nunes, the owner of Casa Mocambo, has her own kind of attachment to Mozambique, being the daughter of a retornado – a term referring to Portuguese people who lived in the former colonies until 1974. The name of her space is inspired by the Mocambo neighborhood, which formerly existed in the current Lisbon district of Santos, an historical African area where slaves were traded from the 16th century.
At the end of the 18th century, the area was renamed as Madragoa after nuns who were in Goa returned to Rua das Madres – removing any connection to the former African colonies, which by the 1950s were agitating for freedom. By then, the African population had started to move and with time, the neighborhood changed and most all connection to the continent disappeared. Casa Mocambo, Ana says, aims to rekindle that connection and recall a past that others have worked so hard to forget.

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