The New York Times’s travel editors recently acknowledged their own tragic powers, fretting about whether a writer should reveal “hidden gems” and thereby incite a mob of travelers who cannot help but inflict on world culture what Henry Kissinger confessed of diplomacy: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
Last summer, they nearly reviewed Lisbon’s best restaurant, Patua, but thankfully couldn’t find it, as the owners had lost their lease.
And so, this summer, we—myself, the Indian novelist Deepti Kapoor, the Portuguese actress Joana Ribeiro, and another friend best left unnamed, as he remains AWOL from Bibi Netanyahu’s I.D.F.—have gathered at Patua to kill it gently, hoping to destroy its novelty and so its allure for other, bigger media outlets by covering it here first.
We sipped a sparkling white with lychees in Patua’s new location with Daniela Silvestre and Francisco “Chico” de Jesus Rodrigues, who founded the restaurant in 2018, after 20 years of cooking in Lisbon restaurants, though the creation story starts much further back, on the other side of the world.
Rodrigues’s great-great-grandfather went to the then colony of Macau, off China’s southern coast, with the Portuguese military in the 1880s. He fell in love with a Cantonese woman. They had three kids and were sailing back to Portugal to marry when he died of tuberculosis mid-voyage, leaving his widow and orphans to carry his body onto the banks of the Tagus.
“She’s got a problem,” Rodrigues says of his great-great-grandmother, “a huge fucking problem.” They were destitute. The story goes that the last Queen of Portugal made a tour of the stricken family’s neighborhood and noticed a Chinese woman with three mixed-race children, one a little girl with blue eyes.
Learning that they were trying to get home, she paid for passage back to Macau, where the blue-eyed girl married Rodrigues’s great-grandfather, a Portuguese shepherd who’d arrived via Goa, on India’s west coast, where Deepti Kapoor spent her 30s. When Kapoor moved to Lisbon, she asked Rodrigues why Portuguese cuisine was so amazing in Goa, yet so arrested at home. Why run a spice trade if you don’t use the spices?
“Salazar,” he replied.
Portugal’s dictator António Salazar never once visited his own colonies. He was perversely proud of keeping the Portuguese in the dark, describing them as his children. World news was censored.
He left only three discernible marks on Portuguese cuisine. The first is Bolo Salazar, a cake without icing. Second, a spatula known here as a “Salazar,” as there was such scarcity during his regime that people were encouraged to scrape every last bit from a bowl with the utensil. As for the third? Unprintable in the paper of record, and even here. But if you must, ask ChatGPT to explain “Portuguese breakfast.”
The Portuguese lost control of Macau in 1966 after slaughtering students protesting colonial corruption and abuses. Rodrigues’s grandfather (the son of the little girl whose plight moved the queen) was an officer who refused orders to fire on civilians, and got sent back to Portugal with his family. Eighteen hours after takeoff and his mother was flying over Spain, a lacework of brilliant lights. And then, suddenly, sheer darkness: Fascist Portugal.
Customs officials saw her trousers and asked her if she had any skirts in her luggage. Yes, she said, a miniskirt. Not suitable, they said, long skirts only, then told her to be quiet about having come from the colonies, or she might find trouble. “That was their welcome back to Portugal,” Rodrigues says.
Then Salazar’s empire went bust and people from every colony came to Lisbon, bringing cuisines from Cape Verde to Goa to Macau—a tyrant’s nightmare, a gourmet’s dream—an influx that made possible the meal that Rodrigues serves after we settle around the cool basement chef’s table, glasses filled with chilled, white coastal wine.
We start with shrimp cooked in semi-caramelized coconut milk, spiced with lemongrass and chili, perfect for dipping golden yuca fries—salty crisp meeting silky sweet. Rodrigues says it’s a family recipe from Macau, named for a crazy uncle, Gege.
“Crazy how?,” I ask.
“Once, a monkey escaped the Macau zoo.”
“How does this concern your uncle?”
“Uncle Gege decides he wants to eat the monkey.”
And ultimately did.
With Uncle Gege’s psycho-gastronomic bona fides thus established, we move to the chicken cafreal. Originally a Mozambican bushmeat dish, it traveled to Goa with Portuguese and African soldiers in the 1500s. At Patua it coats the chicken in a masala paste of coriander, ginger, and green chilies, whose heat breaks against kefir, lime, and sips of more small-batch coastal wine (bottle 1,256 of 2,000), which in turn leads to more cafreal, a heavenly loop.
The dish was first made by Rodrigues at Patua with spices brought from Goa by Kapoor, a full circle of colonial foodways.
“Where does the restaurant’s name come from?” asks AWOL from the I.D.F.
Silvestre explains it’s the name of the Macanese language, derived from the French patois. Patua is made of English, Cantonese, Portuguese, Sinhalese, and Malay words, the unique sound of Macau, which the Chinese leased to the Portuguese in 1554, starting five centuries of mixing. Rodrigues shows us a picture of his family sitting for dinner in the early 20th century. He points to a blond relative, an African one, and Uncle Gege in a well-cut linen suit.
It builds to the Cantonese dong po rou, pan-fried pork belly braised in wine, cinnamon, ginger, orange, and rock sugar. It’s so tender it gives to the side of a fork, sweet-warm like a brownie pulled early from the oven. Then Rodrigues brings out his minchi, a Macanese staple: minced beef and shiitake mushrooms spiced with cloves and star anise, served with fried potatoes over rice with a fried egg.
“It’s a child’s food,” says Silvestre. “It’s what you get on your birthday.”
I ask if it’s a deconstruction of the Portuguese bitoque—steak served with chips in a heavy sauce. “Adaptation,” Silvestre says. “They would not think about deconstructing anything back then.”
Coffee follows with bebinca, a sweet cake made of coconut milk, flour, and egg whites. We eat in grateful silence, hoping the restaurant whose magic evolved across five centuries might—with luck—stay gold another summer.
Dana Vachon is the author of the novels Memoirs and Misinformation (with Jim Carrey) and Mergers & Acquisitions. He lives in Lisbon
