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.

Rua das Portas de Santo Antão is probably the most touristy food street in Lisbon. This pedestrian road is full of restaurants with guys outside hawking their specials and menus offering out-of-season sardines and frozen pizzas. But there’s more to this downtown thoroughfare than just luring American vacationers to overpriced mediocrity. Located on this road, buzzing even before the tourist boom thanks to its central location, musical theaters and local commerce, is one of the city’s timeless classics, O Churrasco. This restaurant looks different from the usual chicken restaurant, with impressionistic paintings hanging from its wooden walls and waiters in bow ties, and has been a camouflaged gem for many years, a particular favorite of middle-class families and theater lovers.

Cervejaria Ramiro is the undisputed temple of seafood in central Lisbon. The 50-year-old business represents an old-school type of eatery: a beer hall where the seafood is fresh and cheap, with a choice from the daily menu or directly from the large aquariums that look out to the street. Taking up two floors of a late-Art Nouveau building on Avenida Almirante Reis, Cervejaria Ramiro is perpetually crowded. The clientele has not been affected by the recent urban regeneration of the area, which is turning the degraded Intendente neighbourhood, long affected by social exclusion, into a fashionable district. In fact, the restaurant was already popular in the 1970s, when eating seafood was new to the capital.

When friends Paulo Sebastião, Paulo Pina and Paulo Neves decided in 2018 to open Isco Pão e Vinho, a small bakery-café, they knew they wanted to be in Alvalade, a Lisbon neighborhood at the edge of the city’s busy center. “We didn’t want to be dependent on tourists, we wanted a neighborhood clientele, and I have to say that 80 percent of the clients here are recurring,” says Pina, who has long worked as a business consultant, a job he still does in addition to running Isco. But the choice of Alvalade presented the pair with a challenge: It can be difficult to stand out in the neighborhood, which has an impressive density of bakeries, restaurants and cafés per square mile.

The up-and-coming, terroir-obsessed wine distributor Os Goliardos is reached through a tiny alley that opens into a courtyard behind an apartment block in Campolide, a residential Lisbon neighborhood just north of the Amoreiras shopping mall. The company keeps a low profile, hiding Lisbon’s greatest wine storeroom in a narrow garage that counts several auto body shops as its neighbors. Since they keep odd hours, we were told to find a mechanic named Senhor Rui who would let us in with his key to pick up our order. We looked for him in a dark garage, where a man sat, listening to fado on the radio, beside a distressed Fiat. Wrong mechanic. Suddenly a large, smiling man in work clothes appeared in the yard jangling a set of keys.

A decade ago Lisbon was a very different city, and the riverfront Cais do Sodré neighborhood was dominated by Mercado da Ribeira, the central market, and office buildings. No Time Out Market, no hipster cafés or trendy restaurants and bars, and hardly any tourists. In 2011 Café Tati opened in an 18th-century building behind the central market, a new entry amongst the old-school tascas and restaurants feeding market vendors and office workers, and the bars and clubs down neglected streets in the neighborhood’s former red light district. Founded by Ramón Ibáñez, a transplant from Barcelona, Café Tati was a breath of fresh air, offering relaxed meals, organic and natural wines, and live music, too.

Last Monday was an emotional day for João Gomes, his wife, Adelaide, his son Nuno and Nuno’s wife, Ludmila. Imperial de Campo de Ourique, the family’s tasca, reopened for business after being shut for almost three months due to anti-Covid measures in Portugal. Hungry Lisboetas can once again enjoy the traditional and hearty dishes cooked by Adelaide, the heart of Imperial’s kitchen, and the joy of a warm welcome by João, the tasca’s enthusiastic frontman. “The biggest pleasure is to be able to talk to my clients again, I really missed this,” he tells us, a mask covering his wide-open smile.

A ripe loquat is a thing of beauty. For a short window of time, usually in April and May, trees heavy with the fruit can be spotted across Lisbon, in both public parks, private gardens and tiny backyards. We have a few favorite ones that we frequent, sometimes surreptitiously, during loquat season to pluck the small, butterscotch-colored fruit and fulfill our craving. But we have to be quick – loquats are as short-lived as they are delicious. Adriana Freire, the founder of Cozinha Popular da Mouraria, a community kitchen, knows the city’s loquat trees even better than we do. Although a popular spring fruit in Portugal, many of Lisbon’s loquat trees are ornamental in nature and often left unpicked.

That the Portuguese love rice – Portugal is, in fact, Europe’s largest consumer of rice – comes as a surprise for many. Unlike Spanish paella or Italian risotto, the country’s rice dishes are barely known beyond its borders. Yet a glance at the menu of any tasca or traditional restaurant in Lisbon will reveal the wealth of Portuguese rice dishes. It’s mostly served soupy, as in arroz de marisco, a stew of seafood and rice, but there are exceptions, such as arroz de pato, almost like a pilaf of duck and rice. You’ll also find it in blood-thickened meat stews such as cabidela and sarrabulho, and soups, from canja, made with chicken and rice, to bean soup. It’s also a staple side dish, usually paired with vegetables or legumes.

A former industrial center, eastern Lisbon has gained a new vibrancy of late, with old factories and decrepit warehouses made over into art galleries, restaurants and breweries. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop this development: A Praça, a marketplace connecting Lisboetas with producers from around the country, has recently set up shop in an old meat-processing plant and civil personnel canteen in the former Manutenção Militar, the industrial area of the Portuguese Army that’s now home to Hub Criativo do Beato. The project is set to open to the public later in the year but is already up and running digitally, offering many products, including fresh produce from local farmers, artisanal smoked sausages, wine, cheese and olive oil, for takeaway and delivery.

These days, plenty of traditional restaurants in Lisbon display in their windows a homemade sign reading “Há Lampreia.” We have lamprey. This simple message is usually illustrated by a pixelated photograph of said creature, almost always taken from Google. While lamprey, an eel-like fish, is one of the ugliest in mother nature’s portfolio, many people are delighted to look at it. That’s because lamprey, the ingredient, has a lot of fans in Portugal, especially in the areas around the rivers (Minho in the north, and Tejo in the center) where it is usually caught during its spawn migration period, from January to April.

It’s hard to imagine now, but Alvalade, a neighborhood north of downtown Lisbon and close to the airport, was comprised mainly of fields in the early 20th century, with farms in the area supplying the Portuguese capital with dairy products as well as fresh fruits and vegetables. Those farms may be long gone, but this residential neighborhood is still famous for its high-quality produce – except rather than being grown on the land, it’s sold at the Mercado de Alvalade, a municipal market that opened in 1964. Although the produce comes from MARL (the large central wholesale market north of Lisbon), a lot of it is still grown in the fertile region north and west of Lisbon.

Switch Samosas (Or, Last Night a DJ Saved My Dinner) As lockdowns continue to ravage the restaurant industry, predictions in the news tell us we ain’t seen nothing yet. Uber Eats riders, unmistakable with their lime green cooler backpacks, have taken over the streets, blazing up the Avenida like road warriors in formation. Mom and pop can barely keep the lights of their tasca on much less pay the delivery shakedown. Hope is scarce for the independent, free-spirited food entrepreneur whose livelihood is built on serving people, directly. If you are as tired of this old tune as we are, prick up your ears to the story of Switch Samosas, a project of Marco Antão AKA DJ Switchdance, Lisbon’s premier DJ-cum-samosa-slinger, who is nurturing his community through the pandemic on his own terms with his mother’s samosas.

The current Praça de São Paulo formed in the wake of a disaster: the square was rebuilt soon after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and serves as a model of the architectural style from that time. More recently, this beautiful yet oft-neglected square has been given a new lease on life thanks to another calamity – the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the summer, chef André Magalhães took over the square’s charming red kiosk – the oldest in Lisbon – and overhauled the menu, filling it with traditional drinks, delicious sandwiches and petiscos. And since the start of November, the grocery store Comida Independente has been organizing a successful farmers’ market in the square on Saturdays, bringing Lisboetas in contact with independent producers and one another – a balm in this strange time of social distancing.

The pandemic has inspired a new passion for quality loaves in Lisbon, a city saturated with industrialized bread. Baking bread became an escape for many people during global lockdowns, and the Portuguese capital was no exception – talk often turned to bread recipes or the desperate search for flour and yeast, which flew off supermarket shelves. Like in many European countries, bread has always been an important part of the Portuguese diet. It’s an essential part of the culinary traditions in the Alentejo, where wheat bread is widespread, and in the north, where corn and rye loaves are also found. In difficult times, it was a staple that fed many empty stomachs.