Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 1

There is an evil genie aspect to life in Setúbal. I'm a huge booster of soulful grandma cooking. But when that's all there is, months of unremitting peasant fare will leave a hound yearning for precision, refinement, and even mild pretension. One needs some goddam yang to counterbalance the smothering yin.

My desperation has driven me as far as London (which is like Pittsburgh from here - $75 round trip flights), but it turns out that I just needed to drive an hour south to the neighboring state of Alentejo—which I could practically spit at from my balcony—and to its capital, Évora.

The Évora food scene is like night and day. The menus are similar (Alentejo has a distinct cuisine, but, like Punjabi food in India, it's worked into the national consciousness). The difference is the profusion of restaurants that are actually restaurants, not grim lunch pots run by cigarette-dangling wizardly grandmas who can't be bothered to skin the fava beans or core the apples. There are captivating winkles and touches. There is care and subtlety. It's The Answer to My Prayers.

It's also expensive. In Setúbal you can't eat well above 15€ (pricier places exist, but they're clip joints). But if you want a special occasion meal, there's no need to fly to London (aka Pittsburgh). Just head south to Évora. I've never been so happy to fork over €30 or €40 for a meal. You get solid value...at least if you choose good places.

But it's not easy! The most anonymous lunch joint in Setúbal is damned good, but in Evora, you must choose wisely. Let's start with a high note.


Sal Grosso
My top find: Sal Grosso (click the titles, e.g. above, for links) was like manna to my tears. Lemonade for a sleeping bee. It's every mixed metaphor rolled into a giant soufflé.

Sal Grosso is a restaurant restaurant. This may sound like nonsense for those who haven't spent months eating grandma pot lunches, but Sal Grosso has pace, bustle and excitement. The staff knows it's bad-ass, and the customers feel lucky to be there, and the chalkboard menu (largest I've ever seen) is packed with enough choices to stoke anxiety—the good kind. I'd almost forgotten what that's like (normally, I trudge through a dank doorway grunting boa tarde, and a sea of limping pensioners moans back indistinctly while harried Grandma hip checks me out of the way to rush stew to someone's table).

I'm eating meat here, obviously. Pork cheeks, to be specific. And those are migas alongside. No one translates it as "stuffing", but it's moistened seasoned bread crumb, so...yep. This one's tomato flavored and colored, and the acidic sharpness cuts like a knife, perfect counterbalance to the unctuous cheeks.

Big takeaway: Setúbal is for fish—Évora natives envy the quality our grilled fish—but Évora's about meat, further heightening the yin/yang aspect. If you ever visit Portugal, hit Setúbal for fish, Evora for meat...and let Lisbon be your souvenir shop.

Bread's great everywhere in Portugal, but better in Alentejo, and better still here. Yeah, the yellow one is broa de milho, the Portuguese cornbread that is, alas, mostly found in the north.

This was the first salad I've had in two years that didn't come with greasy bottles of oil and vinegar for self-dressing. Fancy!

Pudim de água. "Water pudding" might not sound exciting, but just look at that! Those almond flakes are not throwaway. They're super fresh and careful.

Dangerously high prices compared to my €8 complete lunches back home. But entirely worth it.


A Choupana
Right next door to buzzy Sal Grosso, give or take a century, is A Choupana.

You figure this is the quintessential cozy Portuguese lunch room, right? Straight out of our collective unconscious! Ah, Portugal!

No. None of that's true. Nothing like this exists, aside from this one unicorn. Counter seating is unknown here. The hobbit hole coziness is aberrant. This is not, at all, what Portugal is like.

I desperately want to come back and eat here. My eye is very much on the ensopado de galinha do campo, country hen stew. Not a normal offering, but totally Alentejan (for more on all things hen, see my trip notes from El Salvador). I love counter seating. Table seating makes me feel like I'm on display. For many people, that's a feature, not a bug. But, me, I'm in it for the food. I am not a decor element.

Menu shots:

Recanto
I actually started the trip at Recanto, which I did not fully trust despite its sterling reputation. Online photos had sent up warning flares. But I figured they'd know what they're doing, having earned senior status in a solid restaurant town.

Nyuh-uh.

Welcome to fricking Instagram.

Behold overcooked duck with unrendered rubbery fat strewn with molar-busting pretzel salt, plus a multilayered vaguely Frenchy potato slab reheated to the puckered point, served with a zippy raspberry sauce with strong shampoo vibes. Ugh.

You can fail here. This isn't Montreal (where even crap restaurants are like blessings from some benevolent god).


Snack Bar Portugal

I was here on my one previous visit, and Snack Bar Portugal remains my proudest Évora discovery. No one here knows about it outside its small die-hard clientele, all Portuguese. By contrast, literally every other restaurant was full of Americans, which we'll ponder in an upcoming installment.

This is one of Évora's humblest restaurants, but it's a great restaurant. Cheery, clean, the owner and his family are full of positivity and kindness, and the food has both the grandma soul you'd expect in a humble lunch room, but also some magic.

This watercress soup tasted like saffron. Which makes no sense, because it's not often used here, and certainly never in a cheap canteen. I asked the waitress, and the older Portuguese wife sitting two feet from my right elbow, who'd just eaten an entire meal without saying a single word to her husband, broke in to explain the culinary alchemy that yielded the saffron flavor via a 2000 word soliloquy I 40% understood. None of this would happen in Setúbal, where I don't think anyone even knows what saffron is, and where the wives stay home.

In any case, this was one of the great soups of my life.

Then feijoada do choco. Beans and cuttlefish. Kicked the ass of the versions I've had back home. This was downright magisterial.

Finally, bobo de caramelo, caramel custard. Nothing deep or refined, but all balances nailed. What a meal. I left glowing.


To be continued...