Across the street from our apartment building in the Anjos neighborhood of Lisbon is a small storefront with a few tables inside. The owners post their hand-written lunch menu on the greasy windows every day, inevitably including the classic bacalhau (salt cod) option. Judging from the clientele, if we were 75 year old Portuguese men, we’d fit right in there.
On the corner is a cafe and pastry shop that also serves lunch (a common combination). Their pasteis de nata (mini custard pies) are pretty good, and they serve Cafe Negrita. What type of coffee you serve in Portugal is apparently very important, and the logo will decorate the business signs, the cups, the sugar, and napkins. Cafe Negrita smells better than it tastes, a nice plus because we can smell the factory roasting almost daily a block from our apartment.
There are also two small convenience markets on the street. Someone is always cooking Indian food in the basement of one of them, and the Indian food aromas compete with the coffee roasting – this is not a bad thing. The other convenience store has enough fruit that there’s a pleasant radius of orange perfume all around it. On the neighboring blocks, there are plenty of other stores that sell just about everything in bric-a-brac format: clothes, kitchen stuff, phone gear, electric supplies, more fruit, more Indian food smells.
5 Minutes walking gets your to the Mercado do Forno do Tijolo. It has 2 helpful fishmongers, a butcher, a frozen seafood / wine place (this is a thing), a bakery, a wine outlet store, several vegetable stalls and several fruit stalls. It starts wrapping up around noon, and we’re always the youngest people there. If you miss the traditional market hours, you can always shop at the adjacent, omni-present Lidl, a discount German grocer ala Aldi.
Block after block in Anjos, the streetscape is similarly filled with traditional lunch spots, cafes, and stores. The streets are lined wall-to-wall with tall apartment buildings plastered over with Art Deco tile or brightly painted. The cobblestone sidewalks bustle with people going to and fro. Cars park wherever they can find a space often bulging out into intersections. Aside from the cars, it doesn’t seem much has changed in 100 years.
There are a few appealing outliers.
At lunch The Brick Cafe is slammed. Amongst the several dishes of the day, the traditional food like Rice with Duck are listed right above Turkey Chili Burrito. It’s bright and airy but cozy at the same time with tables practically stacked on top of each other, especially now that they have a Christmas tree. Next door is the new and tiny Fábrica do Gelado serving up standard flavors and some fun ones like Salted Toffee and Pineapple-Ginger. Down the way is the Carvoaria, a restaurant dedicated to serving a lot of perfectly cooked and delicious Portuguese meat alongside plenty of reasonable bottles of Portuguese wine. It’s packed for dinner every night of the week, and we always hear a Happy Birthday song while we’re eating.
For nightlife the Kimbo Bar and Pub has no windows, and it’s open from 9pm to midnight, more or less, usually less. You can tell it’s open when the string of Christmas lights out front is lit. We have once or twice seen people go in there but haven’t mustered up the courage to join them. Their clientele is unclear, but it’s not us.
Overall Anjos is a predominately traditional neighborhood but there are some signs of new life. Hopefully, the neighborhood can maintain its character and meet in the middle: Have the fantastic market open when people get out of work – or even on their lunch break. Have more cafes stay open for dinner instead of just lunch. Open a bar that appeals to passers-by. For ourselves, we’ll continue heading out early to shop at the markets, eating Bacalhau (or a burrito), and drinking a tipple of port at our place for a nightcap. We like the old and the new, and Anjos satisfies plenty of the old, but leaves us wandering to other neighborhoods to find more of the new.
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