Offbeat Eats

After a morning of checking out churches and panoramic views (and an aborted attempt at Castelo São Jorge due to unusually heavy crowds), we decided it would be good to seek out a light lunch, and this was a perfect opportunity to drop down into the Baixa and check out one of it’s venerable institutions, Restaurante Nova Pombalina.

After leaving Vila Praia de Âncora, the last day of our coastal hike was a relatively short one; after around 5 km of hiking we came to the village of Moledo and the Minho river, which serves at the boundary between Spain and Portugal. Eschewing the many offers by competing water taxi companies thinking we were pilgrims needing a ride over to Spain to continue hiking the Caminho, we soon arrived in the pleasant ancient walled city of Caminha where the Minho river is intersected by the smaller Coura river. It’s a nice little town that still has much of its medieval city walls, and after we arrived at the formal end of our walk, the Chafariz Praça Conselheiro Silva Torres, a 16th century functional watering fountain, we decided to have a nice break for lunch, settling on nearby Casa Almeida.

After leaving Viano do Castelo, our Caminho hike returned to the coast. Unlike the stretch of the Caminho down by our start in Povoa de Varzim, for the rest of our hike most of the hiking was along fairly quiet and undeveloped coastal stretches. This was one of our longer days (14 km), and almost the entirety of the hike was through undeveloped areas and beaches, with one exception, the town of Amorosa. Amorosa is the settlement associated with Praia Amarosa, one of the Minha’s best-regarded beaches for surfing, but the town itself is nestled behind the dunes with two separate settlement centers: the older village along the southern Praia, and the new city that’s block upon block of large apartment buildings built for vacationers. I’ll be honest, the newer part of town seemed pretty soulless to me, especially in the off-season, and we ran into the reality than in October, with the beach running only a few die-hard surfers, pretty much everything in town was shut down, aside from two places in the village. We decided to check out one of them, Pastelaria Amorosa.

After a splendid evening in Porto, the next morning it was time to head out on our Atlantic coastal hike. We started by catching a ride up to Póvoa de Varzim, a major coastal resort area along the Atlantic coastline. Much of the initial hike was along Póvoa de Varzim’s waterfront, and since we were hiking in October, just after the main holiday season, the waterfront’s many, many small cafés and bars for the summer tourists had mostly gone into off-season mode, either closed entirely or limiting their operating hours. As we reached the northern outskirts of Póvoa de Varzim, the settlements all leave the water’s edge and retreat behind the large sand dunes the compose much of Portugal’s Atlantic seaboard, and the various stores and resort amenities thin out. But we knew there was at least one café in Aguçadoura that still regularly operates in the off-season, and that was our destination: Café Dunas.

Well, after a bit less than a week in France spent in Grenoble and Paris, it was time to catch a late morning flight home. Wanting to avoid the miasma of an airport breakfast, I decided to grab breakfast on my way to the airport. I was staying near Gare du Nord and Gare de L’est, an area not particularly known for French bistrots and cafes, much of it being more of the cell-phone-cover, beauty supply stores, and coiffures district, but right next to my hotel on the corner of the busy Boulevard de Magenta and rue de Chabrol was a nice little cafe that showed some potential: P’tite Bougnate (“Bougnate” means a woman from Auvergne, in a word that has a most interesting etymology, but that’s a story for another time and place).

There are few London traditions of mine as sacred as going out for a good old-fashioned fry-up: a “Full English” breakfast, with at least bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, and toast, and I usually like to add even more to that (at a minimum, tomatoes, and usually black pudding as well). In the area around Pimlico, there’s exactly one place that anyone should even consider for that, and it’s the classic greasy spoon, The Regency Cafe. Virtually every trip of mine to London, even short ones, involve a trip to The Regency, except for holiday trips where they are closed. Indeed, one of my earliest reviews here in 2007 was for The Regency.

Porto as a city has certainly had a lot of ups and downs in its history, but much of the actual downtown area is a product of the 1920s, when the inter-war period was actually quite good for Portugal. The city had some major redevelopment, including the city hall and the Avenida dos Aliados grand boulevard lined with all sorts of great Art Deco and Streamline Modern interiors, nicely blended with some traditional architecture. And that’s also the era when the café became one of the great parts of city life, with all sorts of politicians, writers, artists, communists, students, and the like all gathers over cups of coffee topped with tall piles of whipped cream; at one point there were literally dozens of these throughout Porto, and a handful survive more-or-less intact; one of these is The Majestic Café.

After a morning of wandering around Porto, including some spectacular sightseeing from the Torre dos Clérigos, we were ready for a light lunch. This lead us to the nearby Universidade do Porto district, which has a nice selection of small cafés and bars that cater to the students of the University. It’s an interesting part of town to hang around, since Portuguese universities have a strong set of traditions (called “Praxe”), part of which is still maintaining an academic wardrobe. So several of the places by the University have a lot of students roaming about in their distinctive black cloaks and dresses. In a jokingly referential manner, one of the cafés in the neighborhood, Café Piolho, is named after these students (the name mean “louse”, so they literally are saying the café is infested).

After closing out our stay in the Douro Wine region with a pleasant breakfast, winery tour, and a tasting session at Quinta de la Rosa, it was time to head back to Portugal. Unlike our trip out from Porto, this time the trains were indeed running and strike-free, so we had a very scenic train ride down the Douro river valley until we arrived back in Porto at São Bento station in the early evening. After hauling our luggage back to our hotel room and exploring more of the town, we needed a light dinner, and decided this was a good time to try one of the local well-regarded cafés, Café Santiago.

After an 11 hour flight, we arrived back in Paris. We took this as an opportunity to explore more of Paris, this time with my brother and sister-in-law joining us from London (I still think the Channel Tunnel is a rather cool invention). Despite the somewhat drizzly weather, we decided to do a walk around Montmartre, enjoying this fairly hilly part of the city, included a tour of Sacre Coeur (my first since Junior High) and looking over the city from the terrace. But it was also time for lunch, and we settled on a fairly nice café near the metro station, Café Le Saint-Jean, where I had another chance to indulge in one of my simple pleasures: a basic steak frites. Like uncountably many cafés around Paris, this one has the basic Parisien Café look pretty much nailed: tiny round tables, wooden chairs, black-and-while tile, and robed waiters dashing about with trays of food, coffee, wine, and beer. We quickly found ourselves seated by the window, and after a short perusal of the menu, I decided that their bavette avec frites was the way to go.