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.

Most tascas’ walls are covered with tiles, framed family or hometown pictures and soccer teams’ scarves. But inside A Provinciana, located between the neighborhoods of Restauradores and Rossio, the main decorative objects are dozens of original handmade wall clocks. Some work, some don’t, but all have great meaning for Américo, the owner of this establishment that has been around for 70-plus years. “I built them. All of them. Every Sunday, our day off, I sit at my house building these clocks with what I have: old tiles, bits of wood, pieces of barrel,” he says, glancing proud at his creations.