For decades, Abílio Coelho has served shots of ginja, our favorite cherry liqueur and a Lisbon staple. Our Culinary Crossroads walk in the city isn't complete without it. 

Next to some wooden shelves overloaded with spirits, a photograph of Natália Correia hangs on the wall. The photo’s placement makes it appear as if Correia, cigarette in hand, is surveying the small room, which is crowded with semi-broken tables. The late poet and upstart co-founded this tiny bar/café a few decades ago, and her presence is still felt here and in the neighborhood more generally: A nearby street, with a spectacular view of the city, is also named after her. Botequím is one of Graça’s oldest bars, located on the ground floor of Vila Sousa, one of the worker apartment complexes built at the end of the 19th century.

Although it’s the oldest wine region in Portugal, Dão in central Portugal does not have the high profile of its neighbor to the north, the Douro Valley. And yet, Dão is the birthplace of the touriga nacional, one of the finest grapes in Portugal, a country with more than 300 different grape varieties. Considering this claim to fame, we thought the overlooked Dão region deserved a second glance. If we had any doubts about making the trek out to Dão, they were put to bed by André Ribeirinho. A Portuguese writer and wine judge, Ribeirinho knows the best small-scale Portuguese wine producers and champions them on his website Adegga, a platform he founded to review wines and host wine markets.

It has the makings of a sitcom: two itinerant chefs, one Greek and the other Peruvian, meet in Portugal and decide to open up a restaurant devoted to their home countries’ cooking. Rather than pratfalls, though, we get Pita.gr, a charming restaurant where during the course of one meal we can feast on ceviche, fresh moussaka and tiropita (a Greek pastry made of phyllo dough, feta cheese, honey and sesame seeds), all at the same table. Having the chance to eat delicious food from both countries feels like a privilege in this corner of the Margem Sul (South Bank), half an hour’s drive from central Lisbon.

In summer, there are just a couple of things that lisboetas will queue for: the beach and ice cream. The city is blessed with good places for both, but between the two, we prefer the latter, which in Lisbon tends to be Italian-style gelato, as served in the most long-standing and successful shops in town. Tucked away in a corner of Restauradores, A Veneziana still has the same façade and is run by the same family as when it opened in 1936. The shop is small, with a big esplanada, or terrace, on which customers can sit and enjoy their treats.

Our Culinary Crossroads walk in Lisbon is sure to include a glorious sampling of the famous pastel de nata, the city's iconic and delicious custard tart. 

Lisbon’s communities from Portugal’s former colonies provide the strongest link to the country’s past, when it was the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west. Though integral elements of Lisbon life, these communities can sometimes be an invisible presence in their adopted land, pushed out to the periphery of the city. 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 third installment of the series, we look at Lisbon’s Mozambican community.

The Mozambican community in Lisbon may be small, but the city is blessed with several delightful restaurants serving the food of Mozambique – one of them even a neighborhood landmark.

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 currently 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. Recently the venue exhibited the work of Malenga, a famous Mozambican plastic artist, to much fanfare.

Lisbon is a city that knows how to keep a secret. In the early days of World War II, German, American and British spies overran the capital – Portugal was officially neutral during the war – and many of the city’s bars and casinos were hotbeds of international (in)discretion. Later, just before the Carnation Revolution in 1974, many central cafés were meeting points for covert leftist associations. Today, the hidden bars in Lisbon are decidedly less cloak-and-dagger. Yet there is still a real sense of intrigue when you ring the bells of exclusive clubs, private cultural associations and former brothels, and step inside for a hush-hush drink.

Our Culinary Crossroads walk in Lisbon passes by some of the city's finest butchers, offering the choicest, most expertly-sliced cuts around.  

Every summer, sellers hawking bolas de Berlim – custard-filled doughnuts without a hole in the middle – throng to Portuguese beaches. Plodding across the boiling sand and ringing a bell to announce their arrival, they deliver these beautifully simple pastries to hungry beachgoers, many of whom associate a trip to the coast with the sweet treat. A slew of bolas are sold on the beach each year; the presumed number is almost as eyebrow-raising as the calorie content of a big fat bola filled with custard. It’s no surprise, then, that an app promising to be the Uber of bolas has been an immediate success.

For a few weeks during June, large swathes of Lisbon turn into one extended outdoor cookout. It’s the festival of Santo António, Lisbon’s favorite local saint, and the city celebrates his memory by way of grilling up copious amounts of sardines, so much so that during this period the scent of sizzling fish rolls through the streets of the city’s historic neighborhoods like a bank of fishy fog. In these old-time neighborhoods, the festival also provides residents a chance to play caterer to the masses, with seemingly every local with a halfway decent charcoal grill setting up shop outside their home and grilling sardines for the revelers partying in the streets. The whole scene is a complete departure from the more staid rest of the year and it often feels as if these neighborhood grillers live for just this time, allowing them to play the role of guardians of Lisbon’s most important social tradition.

Shots of ginja, a delightful cherry liqueur beloved by many Lisboetas, are an essential component of our Culinary Crossroads walk in the city.