Alongside chef and restaurateur André Magalhães in his Lisbon restaurant Taberna da Rua das Flores, we stare down a rustic clay vessel piled with a mixture of steaming clams, fragrant cilantro and garlic, wedges of lemon…and not a whole lot more. As recommended by André (“It’s tastier if you use your hands”), we pinch the clams with our fingers and, after eating the meat, use the shells to scoop up the mixture of olive oil, clam broth, herbs and lemon juice that coats the bottom of the dish. It’s savory, rich, salty, tart and fragrant, and as with many Portuguese dishes, we’re left wondering how it’s possible that so much flavor came from so few ingredients.

Despite its name, Tabernáculo by Hernâni Miguel is not a church. It is a sanctuary and haven of sorts, though, a place where the local community gathers weekly for African and Portuguese food, wine and live music. Ministering to this congregation is Hernâni Miguel himself, one of the vibrant Bica neighborhood’s best-known characters. “Estás boa?” Miguel asks passersby on Rua de São Paulo as they pass his place. And “viva!” is the jovial response Miguel exchanges with old and new patrons who enter through the purple, crushed velvet curtains of Tabernáculo. The architecture of the restaurant reveals Roman-style archways and a 15th-century cave that doubled as a wine cellar in times past and which inspired the place’s name (Tabernáculo means tabernacle in Portuguese).

On a narrow and, until recently, slightly forgotten street in Lisbon’s city center, a simple Cape Verdean eatery is holding its own. As one of the few tascas serving up African dishes in this part of town, Tambarina, with its dozen tables and keyboard and mics set up in the corner, bears testimony to this urban quarter’s historical connections to the people of Africa’s northwestern archipelago. Rua Poço dos Negros – a street whose name (poço means “pit” in Portuguese) reveals a disturbing history as a mass grave site for the bodies of enslaved people – is on the border of what until two decades ago was known as “the triangle.” This is an area extending to São Bento and which in the 1970s became home to a new group of migrant Cape Verdeans.

Those normally finding themselves craving Angolan flavors in central Lisbon head straight to Mouraria, the medieval downtown neighborhood that has experienced a conceptual conversion of its peripheral status into a landmark of cultural and culinary diversity. Despite it being the area with the highest density of Angolans in Lisbon’s city center, Angolan restaurants open and close at a rapid rate, with now-shuttered CB favorites Palanca Gigante and Shilabo’s falling prey to this trend. In the beginning, these restaurants were only popular among the Angolan community, but nowadays, due to the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, a new clientele is discovering them. Now that we can’t get the country’s iconic national dish, muamba, at Shilabo’s or Palanca Gigante, we head to Rato instead for a taste of Angola.

Despite Brazil being the largest of Portugal’s former colonies, the presence of its people in Lisbon has only been felt recently. During the 1950s and 60s, Brazilians in Portugal were limited to small groups of students, a few migrant adventurers and those Portuguese descendants born in Brazil who decided to return to the motherland. However, since the 90s, a more regular coming-and-going has been taking place between Brazil and Portugal. This pendulum-like swing of migration is a consequence of their respective political and economic crises and moments of growth. At the beginning of that decade, many Brazilians moved to Lisbon in the wake of the difficult inflationary crisis that was affecting South America’s biggest nation. By 2005, they formed the largest foreign community settled in the Portuguese capital, with more than 30,000 residents.

Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India in the late 15th century laid the groundwork for the Portuguese empire, in which Goa, a small region on the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent with ample natural harbors and wide rivers, would come to play an important role. In the early 16th century, Goa was made the capital of the Portuguese State of India and remained as such until 1961, when the Indian army captured it. Over four centuries of colonial rule, Goan intellectuals most often migrated to Portugal in search of education, especially in the 20th century. Yet following the annexation of Goa by India, many Goans, particularly those working in government and the military, accepted the state’s offer of Portuguese citizenship and made their way to Europe. Others migrated to Mozambique, another Portuguese colony that at the time had not yet gained independence.

Outside of an airy pink wedge of a building off of Praça do Chile, protected from the bright midday sun by an awning with “Fox Coffee” printed on it, we waited with great anticipation for lunch: cachupa do curaçao, a specialty of the house which involves stuffing a leaf of steamed Lombardo cabbage with stewy cachupa and a poached egg. This was our third visit to the so-called “King of Cachupa” and we were working our way through the menu trying to identify what was so different and superior about this cachupa, the signature dish of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony situated off of the coast of West Africa.

In your granddad’s Lisbon, lunch in a tasca may pass silently, the television, on mute, tuned to the mind-numbing variety show Praça da Alegria. It may take years to achieve a first name basis with the dour man behind the counter. On his menu, scribbled on a paper napkin and taped to the window, anything but cozido portuguesa on a Thursday would be tantamount to treason. Now don’t get us wrong, we have a deep appreciation for the code of that bastion of traditional Portuguese cooking that is the tasca – the knee-jerk resistance to change that has helped preserve neighborhood culinary traditions against a ferocious tide of globalized sameness – but, let’s admit it, fun is generally not on the menu.

Simple and quick, the dish bitoque can be found all over Portugal. Its origins are a bit murky, but seem to be connected with the Galician immigrants from Northern Spain who moved to Lisbon during the Spanish Civil War. It consists of a small, thin steak surrounded by carbs (fries and rice), cooked vegetables or a salad of sorts, and topped with a fried egg on top. The essential ingredient is the sauce, however, and across the city of Lisbon are several variations and styles – all are generous and comforting, all are thick, and many include ingredients like bay leaf, garlic, and white wine.

On a hidden street in Lisbon’s residential Anjos neighborhood, Francisco (Chico) Jesus and Daniela Silvestre are busy prepping for dinner service. It’s still early afternoon, but there’s a lot to do before the doors of Patuá open at 7:30pm. Some Chinese art pieces are scattered about their restaurant, hinting at the tastes to come – though these only tell one part of the story. At Patuá, food hailing from the former Portuguese colony of Macau – now administered by China – anchors the menu, but the restaurant is also chronicling the evolution of the Portuguese post-colonial kitchen, with the country’s connection to India and the African continent making an appearance on the plate.

Lisbon in 2021 shared in much of the upheaval of our other Culinary Backstreets cities. Long lockdowns kept us apart from our favorite restaurants and tascas as well as our loved ones. But with the onset of summer, those restaurants that made it through that rough period saw the return of crowds. Lisboetas flocked to the city’s terraces and by October – when Portugal had made it to the top of the world’s list of most-vaccinated populations – folks were thronging indoors, too. After two very difficult years, many beloved places didn’t survive. But in their place, new businesses are opening and opportunities for creativity are blossoming across the city tables.

Despite being incredibly salty, stinky and made essentially out of rotting fish, garum, the ancient Roman sauce, was the ketchup of its day, a ubiquitous condiment found on every table and in every pantry. Prepared by fermenting whole, brined small fish for multiple months, the amber-colored umami bomb was a major part of Roman trade and widely used across a variety of dishes, from meats to salads and even in sweets. Though it was undeniably popular, garum eventually lost its place in the kitchens of the Mediterranean and other parts of the former Roman Empire. Iterations of the pungent sauce exist today, like Colatura di Alici in Italy, but its original recipe and method of production are no more than ancient relics. A rather smelly experiment at an archeological site in Portugal is trying to change that, though.

Port wine and Madeira wine are well-known Portuguese fortified varieties, but Moscatel de Setúbal remains a perfect stranger for many visitors. Which is a shame, since this wine – complex and elegant, with a delicate sweetness and rich flavor – is one of Portugal’s great vinous pleasures. In Lisbon and the south bank, it’s common to enjoy a small glass of Moscatel (muscatel) as either an aperitif (chilled) or a digestive. The fertile land of Setúbal, a peninsula south of the city of Lisbon, has long-been a wine producing region. It is not known exactly when Moscatel – which is made from the Muscat grape, although the name also refers to the grape itself – was first made here, but it is generally accepted that the Phoenicians and Ancient Greeks were trading the wine in the estuary of the Sado River.

Like many of our favorite Lisbon restaurants, Modesta da Pampulha has very humble beginnings. Originally opened in 1920, the eatery started off as a shop selling charcoal and bulk wine with a simple tavern on the side, evolving over the years to become a temple of homestyle Portuguese comfort food. During the week, office workers from the Pampulha area – between the busy Lapa and Alcântara neighborhoods – along with staff from the nearby Ministry of Education and taxi drivers from a stand just in front of Modesta da Pampulha, gather for lunch in the small restaurant to eat the freshly-made daily specials or charcoal-grilled fish and meat.

Cabana do Pescador (the fisherman’s hut) got its start some 50 years ago with a very simple premise: A fisherman named Luís Maria Lourenço decided to sell his leftover daily catch by grilling it on iron barrels halved lengthwise – an old-school upcycled getup that can still be seen at many popular tascas. Since then, this no-frills fish shack has become such an institution that the strip of Costa da Caparica coastline where it sits has come to be known as cabana de pescador as well. Costa da Caparica was originally comprised of small fishing villages. In the 1970s, it became the favorite seaside getaway for Lisboetas, owing to its proximity to the Portuguese capital and its numerous spacious beaches.