Offbeat Eats

After we finished with our coastal hike, we eventually needed to get back to Lisbon for our return trips. Instead of heading back through Porto (which all of us had previously experienced), we decided that we’d take a minor diversion to check out another of Portugal’s major cities: Coimbra. Home to Portugal’s primary university, Coimbra is an old town on a hillside that, in a country known for steep cities, is particularly steep, and fun to explore. Another advantage of Portugal is that it has quite a few high-end (and particularly Michelin-starred) restaurants that are still relatively affordable, and a few of the better-reviewed places in Portugal are located in Coimbra. We ended up taking our first evening in Coimbra to visit O Palco (“the stage”). While they haven’t yet received a star, they have some top-of-class cuisine, with an elaborate 12-course meal.

Before departing on our coastal hike, we had a Saturday evening in Porto to do some light sightseeing and revisit some favorite sites. We had pretty thoroughly explored Porto in 2018, and one of the areas we liked visiting was the sister city of Vila Nova de Gaia on the other side of the Douro river, and after walking the waterfront and enjoying a Porto Tonico at one of the sidewalk cafés, it was time to consider dinner. Much of the time Porto is the quieter, more laid back city compared to Lisbon, but that doesn’t generally apply to weekends: Porto’s waterfront is absolutely hopping on the warmer weekends of the year, so it was important for us to find a place where we could get reservations, hopefully for some good Portuguese food to start to get us calibrated for our walk. After consulting The Fork (which seems to get more support in Europe than OpenTable), we booked a table at DeCastro Novo de Gaia.

After our day of exploration in Lisbon, our next stop was Porto, to rendezvous with my brother and sister-in-law to start our hike. Taking the very excellent Alfa Pendular high-speed train, after a comfortable journey we soon found ourselves arriving at Porto Campanha station. From there to our hotel down by the Douro Waterfront is a relatively short walk, so we decided to use this as an opportunity to do one of Offbeat Eats Health Check re-visits to a favorite spot from our 2018 trip, Casa Guedes.

Our main vacation this year was a two-week trip to Portugal, centering on a hike from Povoa de Varzim to Caminha along the Caminho Português da Costa. While our previous trip to Portugal was staged through Porto, between cheaper fares and sitting on a giant American Airlines credit from some weather-related delays back in March, we ended up booking through Lisbon and then taking the train over to Porto the next day to rendezvous with my brother and sister-in-law. This gave us a nice day of air travel recovery while exploring some of the lesser-traveled parts of Lisbon, including the excellent aquarium. Lisbon is a very popular and crowded tourist destination these days, so when it came time for dinner, I decided this would be a good opportunity to eschew the more popular parts of Lisbon (Alfama, Baixa, and Chiado), so I found a nice little family restaurant in the Lapa district west of downtown, Restaurante Raizes.

As I mentioned in my review of Café Santiago, Porto loves its sandwiches, and pretty much any Porto tourism or dining guide will recommend that you find one of several joints and try out a Francesinha. But Porto doesn’t just limit itself to the Francesinha; the pork products (both fresh and cured) of Portugal, and their love of fresh Portuguese-style rools (papo secos) make for a lot of great sandwich possibilities, so all sorts of other cafés around Porto offer up their take on the “sande” (sandwich). And if there’s any place that’s almost guaranteed to be on most any recommendation list alongside a Francesinha, that’s going to Casa Guedes for a Sande de Pernil.

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).

Compared to the rest of the Douro, which generally is quite calm and free of a lot of tourist traffic, Pinhão is the epicenter of activity in the Alto Douro; almost every day there’s at least one river cruise ship coming or going (day trips from Porto are popular, as are cruises headed further up the Douro to Spain), and it’s also the largest concentration of both hotels and restuarants (although the Douro valley still seems to be catching up with tourism; most Quintas having to implement reservations, and several places having recently added accommodations). Enjoying the sunset After completing a tour and a very enjoyable port tasting at Quinta do Bomfim, and eyeing the bountiful picnic baskets that some other guests had reserved there (we’d come back and do that later in our trip), we were actually getting a bit hungry, so as the sun started to set we were looking around Pinhão’s harbor for dinner. The first place we looked for, Bar Restaurante Veladouro, apparently was temporarily closed (they were open the next weekend when we returned to Pinhão), so we ended up at the place next door, Restaurant LBV 79 (run by the same people running the LBV Guesthouse that we were staying at up the hill… if you are wondering about the name, LBV is short for “Late Bottle Vintage”, a regular Port wine term).

After a night in Porto, it was time to head out for the main purpose of our trip, a week-long hiking trip in the Douro Wine Valley. After waking, having a pleasant breakfast at our hotel, and heading out to the train station, we hit the first complication: a “greve” (Labor strike). All of the trains and ticket offices were shut down, but the folks arranging our trip at Portugal Green Walks were able to easily arrange alternative transportation, so instead of a scenic train ride up the Douro river valley, we instead had a surprisingly scenic drive across Portugal, seeing the Serra do Marão mountains and passing through the recently-opened Marão tunnel and Vila Real, getting dropped off at our guest house in Pinhão mid-afternoon. In all that shuffle, we hadn’t really had a chance to grab lunch, so we headed down into Pinhão to try and find a light snack to tide us over to a later Portuguese dinner. This is always a bit of a challenge in Portugal, since while various travel guides insist that Portugal doesn’t do the siesta of neighboring Spain, especially in the rural parts of Portugal, they essentially do observe it: the vast majority of restaurants, and a good fraction of other businesses, will be closed in the afternoon, with a smattering of cafés starting to open in the mid-afternoon if you want to sit around drinking coffee or beer while watching futebol. But we found one major exception to this on just down from Pinhão’s train station: Ó-Por-Co, a simple little café serving an assortment of wine and petiscos (small plates).

Carol and I try to pick a different, quirky destination every year to continue our geographic and culinary exploration. Originally, we planned to do a trip to the Azores this year, but various scheduling and logistical issues kept that from happening during the ideal weather months. But the idea of visiting Portuguese islands got us thinking a bit, and when looking into alternative destinations, we realized that October was actually quite a good time to visit Porto and the Douro river valley. So, with the assistance of Portugal Green Walks, a touring service that arranges itineraries and manages luggage transfers between hotels, we booked a two-week stay in Portugal. If you are into “walking holidays”, I highly recommend them. Arriving after a rather long day from a red-eye flight from Boston to Madrid, followed by a long layover and a short flight to Porto, we soon found ourselves settled into a hotel in Porto and setting out to do some modest exploration and dining before calling it and evening and leaving for Pinhão the next morning on the train. After a short walking tour checking out Lello (the famous bookstore), seeing the old city and Ribiera, and crossing over on the Dom Luís I Bridge, we spend our early evening relaxing and drinking port wine, and then decided that before we keeled over from hunger and exhaustion, we should probably get an early dinner and head back to the hotel. For those that aren’t aware of it, the Iberian peninsula is renowned for their generally late hour of dining, so looking for a table around 7pm is more than a little early, but being a tourist town, we found Taberninha Do Manel

Every once in a while you run into one of those places that you’ve passed by a gazillion times, every time vowing that next time you’ll actually go in and check it out? Well, in Montreal’s Plateau neighborhood, one such place is Rotisserie Coco Rico. We first noticed, not because of the food, but because Coco Rico has a long tradition of having elaborate graffiti-style wall murals. I no longer remember what the mural was like the first time I saw in in 2002 (on the way to Schwartz’s down the street), but by 2007 it involved a simple spraypainted chicken adorned with hearts. By 2010, it involved a group of singing chickens. And by 2013, that had been in turn replaced by an elaborate “Conquistador Chicken” mural. But that’s not what made us stop. No, lingering to look at the mural also immerses you in the intense aroma wafting out of the store, of multiple marinated chickens roasting away on their rotisseries. So on this visit in 2015… we finally had a chance to stop in and visit.