Lisbon, or: The City That Feeds You Before It Explains Itself

I arrived in Lisbon on a Tuesday morning having done, by my standards, a reasonable amount of research. I had a list. I had a neighbourhood map with small circles on it. I had three restaurant recommendations from people who had been recently and spoken about the place with the slightly faraway look of someone describing a dream they're not sure was a dream.

By Tuesday evening I had lost the list, ignored the circles entirely, and eaten the best meal of my trip at a table I found by accident down a street I went down by mistake, in a restaurant with no written menu and a waiter who communicated the options through a combination of Portuguese, hand gestures, and what I can only describe as implication.

I had the fish. Obviously I had the fish.

Lisbon is one of those cities that resists the standard tourist logic. It does not present itself to you. It does not lead you helpfully from landmark to landmark with the cooperative attitude of a city that has thought carefully about visitors. It is hilly, in the specific way that means you will turn a corner expecting flat ground and find instead a staircase going in a direction you did not require, and at the top of the staircase there will be a viewpoint — a miradouro — where someone is selling beer from a cool box and the entire city is laid out below you in the afternoon light like an argument you have just won.

This happens repeatedly. You stop being surprised and start being grateful.

The hills, incidentally, are part of the eating. Lisbon at street level is tascas and pastelarias and small neighbourhood restaurants that have been in the same location since before the concept of a restaurant review existed. Going slightly uphill, you find the same things with better views. Going downhill, you find the waterfront and the smell of grilled sardines, which in May is already beginning, because the sardine season starts in June but the city seems to treat this as a suggested rather than a hard date.

The tasca is the thing to understand about Lisbon. Not the tourist tasca, which exists and is fine and will give you a perfectly acceptable experience at prices that reflect its awareness of your postcode. The neighbourhood tasca, which is smaller and louder and has handwritten menus or, as I discovered, no menu at all, and which operates on the assumption that you are there to eat whatever is good today rather than whatever you had decided you wanted.

This requires a small surrender of control that I recommend unreservedly. The waiter at my accidental Tuesday restaurant — a man of approximately seventy with the expression of someone who has seen every kind of tourist and made his peace with all of them — brought bread and butter to the table without being asked, then a small plate of cured meat, then arrived to inform me that there was bacalhau, which is salt cod, or there was grilled fish, which was whatever had come in, and I should choose. I chose grilled fish. He nodded as if I had answered a question correctly.

What arrived was a sea bream, grilled over charcoal, with boiled potatoes and olive oil and a salad that had been dressed simply and recently and understood its role. There was wine that came in a ceramic jug and cost very little. There was bread throughout. There was, at the end, a small glass of something sweet that I did not order and was not charged for.

The whole thing cost €14. I sat there for an hour and a half because there seemed to be no reason to leave.

Lisbon, historically, is a city that has eaten well out of necessity as much as pleasure. It sits at the mouth of the Tagus river, with the Atlantic immediately beyond, and for five centuries it was the centre of a trading empire that brought back spices from India, chillies from Brazil, influences from the whole connected Portuguese-speaking world. The result is a cuisine that looks simple — grilled fish, olive oil, garlic, bread — but carries several continents of accumulated knowledge underneath it.

The pastel de nata alone is worth a small digression. This is the custard tart, made with a shatteringly crisp pastry shell and a filling of egg, cream and sugar that sets just so in a very hot oven, eaten warm with cinnamon and a small coffee at a counter at approximately nine in the morning. It was invented by monks at the Jerónimos monastery in Belém in the eighteenth century, using the egg yolks left over after egg whites had been used to starch their habits, which is the sort of detail that makes you feel that monastic life may have had its compensations. The original recipe is still held by the Pastéis de Belém bakery, which has been producing them since 1837 and which I visited at ten on a Wednesday morning and found already busy in the way that suggests it is always busy at any time anyone has ever been there.

I had two. Then I walked back along the waterfront and looked at the river and thought about having a third. I did not have a third.

I should have had a third.

In May, Lisbon is at a temperature that feels like a gift. Not yet the full heat of summer, which arrives in July and August with a completeness that keeps you inside between midday and four. Just warm enough to sit outside in the evening with a glass of vinho verde — the young, slightly sparkling wine of northern Portugal, low in alcohol, high in the quality of making everything feel manageable — and watch the light do what the light does in Lisbon, which is to turn everything a specific shade of gold that I am fairly certain is the reason half the city's residents develop a faint superiority complex about other cities.

It is justified. The light is extraordinary.

On my last evening I found my way, partly by intention and partly by the usual Lisbon combination of hills and wrong turns, to a small square in the Alfama neighbourhood where someone was playing fado from inside a bar, the door open to the street. I stood outside for a few minutes and listened.

Fado is not cheerful music. It is built around saudade, a Portuguese word that translates approximately as longing or melancholy but which the Portuguese will tell you does not translate at all, that it describes a very specific emotional condition that belongs to this place and this history. Whether or not that is entirely true, it seemed plausible enough on a warm May evening in a city that feeds you before it explains itself, standing in a square I would not be able to find again on a map, listening to someone sing about loss with a conviction that made even the tourist ten metres away put down their phone.

I went back inside. I had another glass of wine. I did not find the list with the small circles on it.

I didn't need it.