Our third day in Lisbon was mostly spent visiting the Gulbenkian Museum, which has both classical and modern art wings, and one of the better collections of Rembrandt, Monet, Rubens, Manet, Renoir, and Degas. Between doing the classical wing and the modern art wing, we decided to break for lunch, and head to the nearby El Corte Inglés (a chain of Spanish department stores) to check out their food court on the top floor. It’s an impressive food court, with a selection of Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, and Brazilian restaurants around a central seating court. After reviewing several of the menus, we settled on the Brazilian place, Jacaré.
Jacaré (the name is Portuguese for “Alligator”) is an informal Brazilian restaurant by well-known Lisbon restaurateur José Avillez. The menu is pretty simple, focusing on a relatively compact list of grilled vegetable and meat dishes, the latter being done as a classic grilled meat plate: pick a meat, pick a sauce, and pick some sides. They’ve also got a nice list of accompanying appetizers and a rather nice selection of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. I decided to try the “Gabby Gator”, a refreshing blend of fresh-squeezed ginger, cardamom, lime, and red berries, with a hint of cardamom.
For my lunch, I decided to go with the grill plate, selecting a grilled Iberian Pork Picanha. This comes out on a sizzling platter with a small side of farofa (toasted casava flour), and a serving of piri-piri sauce on the side. A relatively simple dish in itself, this was a very flavorful pork picanha (what we’d call a “pork sirloin” in America), just with just the right amount of sear, with the pork fat just starting to break down. The farofa actually adds a nice bit of crispy texture as well.
Carol opted for a pinanha as well, but decided to go for the beef version, and had the same overall experience: a very nicely grilled (between medium and medium rare), a perfect sear, and a nice fresh chimichurri sauce to round it out.
Both meats were really good, but to me where Jacaré really shined was some excellent side dishes. Between Carol and I we got a nice lettuce salad, biro-biro rice (Brazilian white rice with matchstick potatoes), stewed black beans, and broccoli with bacon and almond shavings. Particularly favorite of mine where the biro-biro rice: I’ve had this several times before, but here the matchsticks were done perfectly, and the entire dish had been lightly griddled on a flat top to give everything just the slightest bit of extra crisp, and just a little bit of grilled caramelization. The broccoli with bacon and almost shavings was also great, also being finished on the griddle to get just a bit of char. Combined with the nice grilled meats, this made for an excellent little lunch.
Meanwhile, Sophie decided to try the vegetarian side of the menu, selecting their non-grilled menu item, a vegetable moqueca. A traditional moqueca is a stew of shrimp or fish with tomatoes, onions, garlic, lime, coriander, palm oil and coconut milk. Jacaré’s version was a very flavorful version wit roasted vegetables instead of the seafood, topped with fresh microgreens and crumbled peanuts. The result was quite flavorful, somewhat resembling a vegetable satay.
Overall, we really enjoyed our light lunch at Jacaré, the food was fresh and well-prepared, the portions nicely sized, and the flavors nice and bold. For a bonus, we were able to get one of the finest slices of chocolate cake in existence from the adjacent Landeau bakery, and enjoy a nice view of the northern part of Lisbon.
