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It seems that Portuguese cuisine is currently experiencing an international craze. Perhaps. In any case, we see a lot of "foodies " from all over the world flocking to Lisbon, which partly helps to stimulate local gastronomic creativity, but also puts the city at risk of gentrification.
In the tiny cobbled streets, you can see graffiti such as "Tourists Suck " or " Fuck AirBnB ". But we also meet grandmothers who sell you a few shots of ginjinha, a cherry liqueur, which we take down in the middle of the afternoon wondering what life we could have had if this grandmother had been ours. In restaurants, people all smoke, including those where on the white tablecloths are arranged wine glasses of three different sizes, like O Magano. Port-tonico, which as its name suggests combines port and tonic, and which you can not do without once you have tasted it, is generous ; It drizzles a bean salad, a Portuguese sausage salad or a nice grilled sole. It ends with a kind of cake, or rather cake-id which consists of a large pile of egg yolks thickened by sugar. The appropriate conclusion to a series of sensational dishes, never cool, at least never cool in the "trendy " sense of the word. But by inversion, this ignorance of cool, of self-conscious cool, makes the taste experience authentically cool – because above all delicious.
No reluctant bosses
From their restaurants and culinary traditions, Lisboners are not the type to make a whole dish – no pun intended. If you go to the Cervejaria Ramiro, for example, an establishment considered by some experts to be the best in Lisbon, you will not meet anyone, neither among the owners nor among the customers, who will come to tell you that he knows very well the incredible guy who caught the crab you eat, or tell you in detail how it was prepared. This kind of conversation is not in the habits of the Portuguese capital, or let's say that it is not a priority of its inhabitants. The Cervejeria is nevertheless popular with tourists for its exceptional seafood menu: let us mention its small shrimps with garlic and olive oil, its large super fleshy shrimps, its clams to be damned, not to mention its rock lobster – the "rock lobster " of the B-52's song – , which, despite its indecent dimensions, makes you want to order a second one as soon as the first one is finished.
