Oddly Bookended Food Day in Portugal

All Portugal trip reports in chronological order:

Oddly Bookended Food Day in Portugal (Nepali and Goan in Almada)
My Portuguese Rosebud (questing for a second helping of the arroz de mariscos that changed my life 30 years ago)
Bacalhau Score (glorious restaurant version of a homely grandma dish in Almada)
Grappling with Chowhounding Hubris (good-not-great pork cheeks in Sintra)
Taskinha Do Chef (Torres Vedras, Portugal) (exquisite family-run restaurant in Torres Vedras)
False Friends, Inadvertent Penetration, and Coimbra (diagnosing the Coimbra Problem)
Solar dos Amigos (rustic culinary splendor in Caldas da Rainha)
Burguezia do Leitão (the best roast suckling pig palace near Coimbra, in Casal Comba)
A Casa do Jorge (smashing wine country steakhouse in Santana, near Azeitão)


Odd food day in Portugal. I’ve been here a while (will try to post previous eats eventually) and needed a change of pace, so I started out with chicken momo with not-quite-hot-enough sauce, pretty good, at a Nepali restaurant in Almada called "Base Camp", which strikes me as an extremely clever name (though if I were Nepali, it might be like calling a soul food restaurant "Aunt Jemima's", Idunno).



Many hours later, I closed out with carill de frango do campo. "Carill" seems to translate to "doghouse", so I just ordered it on a whim, and found that it was curried chicken.



I know what you're saying: "curry in Portugal....ugh bad move". But nyuh-uh. Goa, a state of India, was a former colony of Portugal's, and while it's damned hard to find serious Goan food here, Indian touches have baked deeply into the food culture. So if British-style curry (harsh and scrapey) is a slap in the face to Indian chefs, this is more gracious. And I'm a sucker for "country" chicken in Iberia (see the bruisers at my all-time favorite restaurant, The House of Garlic Mayonnaise in Badalona, just north of Barcelona). 

This was just some stupid anonymous bar on a grimy street of a not-food town (Dom Afonso Henriques 10, Almada). And pretty great. Nine euros.

This is why we go to Portugal.