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.

Among the many enticing culinary attractions of our revamped Crossroads walk in Lisbon include a sampling some of Portugal's quintessential wine and cheese.

Inside the humble municipal market building of an elderly neighborhood between Belém’s touristic spectacles and the sprawling Monsanto park is the oldest Azorean restaurant in the Portuguese capital. In non-descript Ajuda, with a view over Ponte Abril 25, this place transports Lisboetas with tastes of the remote and alluring Atlantic archipelago. When Espaço Açores opened 10 years ago it was one of four restaurants in Lisbon serving the food of the Azores. The others have since closed, a fact that at first seems difficult to understand: food from these islands is incredibly good and more often than not reproduces traditional dishes from the mainland, albeit with considerably better ingredients.

Located in the Atlantic at the same latitude as Casablanca, Madeira may be a small island, but there’s so much to see that it takes three to five days to get a real sense of it. An hour and a half by plane from Lisbon, the capital and largest city is Funchal, a historic town whose claim to fame is a more recent one: it’s where soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo was born (a statue and a museum in his honor can both be found here). Historically one of the first settlements of the golden age of Portuguese exploration, the island became an outpost for trade and ships going to Brazil or India.

Here’s the delicious beginning of our new Crossroads culinary walk in Lisbon. The broa de Arganil is a beguiling, spice-filled cake packed with traces of Portugal’s explorations far afield.

Our Song of the Sea walk celebrates Lisbon's port and the old neigborhoods surrounding it. It also, of course, features prominently the stunningly fresh seafood that is served in the area.

Portugal may be known for its abundance of wines, but beer also has a centuries-old history here, with production rooted in local traditions. It’s a story that has quietly been forgotten, but it seems like now is the right moment for a revival. Portugal’s beer landscape has since the 1940s been dominated by the Sagres-Super Bock duopoly, whose common lagers are nothing to write home about. Created out of a merger between previously competing associations, these two new brands (grouped under Central de Cervejas e Unicer) had a huge impact on Portuguese beer habits. The new industrial focus on a simple and standard product effectively wiped out hyper-local hops culture.

Cities experiencing rapid urban transformation often find themselves suspended between past and future, with those respective cultures in close juxtaposition. The Santa Apolonia train station, a simple neoclassical building from the 19th century that once served as Lisbon’s central rail hub, is a good example of this; a visit to its north and south sides reveal different routines, atmospheres and of course, flavors. On the waterfront, a few former dock warehouses are the home of gourmet palates. Cais da Pedra, the project of the famous chef Henrique Sá Pessoa, is a modern restaurant decorated in stone, iron and mirrors.

These beautiful giant cabbages were captured at Lisbon's Mercado da Ribeira, an essential stop on our Lisbon Eats: The Culinary Backstreets Essentials walk.

Varinas may no longer be prowling the streets of Lisbon, yet they remain iconic characters of the city. Until the 1980s, one would regularly hear these women loudly advertising the fresh fish they sold out of baskets they carried on their heads as they walked the hilly streets around the Lisbon. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was what we call the ‘aveirense invasion.’ They were coming mostly from the Aveiro region in northern Portugal, particularly from Ovar,” explains Appio Sottomayor, a journalist, author and a renowned expert in Lisbon history. (This is why they were known as ovarinas and eventually, once the “o” was dropped, varinas.) 

Though ceramic dishes or tinned sardines are the standard take-home souvenirs for visitors to Lisbon, a less traditional – but still unique – gift from the city is the source of the warming aroma that permeates its cafés morning, noon and night. A strong bica (espresso) is an integral part of Lisbon’s smellscape, and the few chimneystacks in sight over peripheral skylines reveal that there are still local businesses providing beans to restaurants and traditional stores here. Consuming this product, which has a long history, is deeply embedded in the city’s day-to-day, but cultural shifts (today it is quaffed more at the bar rather than at home), means many of the old coffee shops are now obsolete.

Senhor Domingo serves up a wicked homemade Cape Verde “grog” from his simple restaurant in central Lisbon. The toast goes to him, for cranking up the morna, stirring up the cachupa and making this corner of the city a bit more Cape Verdean. We’re all better for it.

Lisbon is still one of the best cities in Europe for fresh, unpretentious seafood dining, despite the onslaught of fads and newfound taste for speculative real estate. Eating mollusks here – as at a cervejaria-marisqueira, a sort of old-school beer and seafood house – is not at all associated with the luxury it symbolizes elsewhere. Here, it is normal to dig out the insides of unique, claw-like barnacles or suck the heads of the freshest prawns for a decent price in a genuine atmosphere. And in such restaurants, forget the lime tart or crème brûlée afterwards: the purist’s dessert after a shell-laden chowdown is a prego – a garlic-laced beef sandwich that couldn’t be fancy even if it tried.

On our Song of the Sea culinary walk, you'll have the chance to partake in only the freshest seafood found in Lisbon, or anywhere else on the planet.