Rua das Portas de Santo Antão & the Casa do Alentejo

Why is it significant?

You are standing on Rua das Portas de Santo Antão, a pedestrian street of menus on easels, tables spilling onto the cobbles and waiters calling out to everyone who passes. Find the plain doorway at number 58 and climb the stairs inside.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing on Rua das Portas de Santo Antão, a pedestrian street of menus on easels, tables spilling onto the cobbles and waiters calling out to everyone who passes. Find the plain doorway at number 58 and climb the stairs inside. Nothing on the façade prepares you for it: a courtyard that seems to have been lifted out of Granada, all horseshoe arches, carved plaster and glazed tiles.

The building began as a seventeenth-century palace, home to noble families for generations. In the early twentieth century it was given its Moorish-revival makeover, the height of fashion for anything exotic, and for a few years it housed a smart club with gaming tables. Since the 1930s it has belonged to the association of people from the Alentejo, the vast, hot country of wheat, cork oaks and olive groves south of the Tagus, whose sons and daughters came to Lisbon looking for work and wanted a home away from home.

That makes it the perfect first stop on a food walk. Alentejo cooking is a poor kitchen that became a national pride. Açorda, a bread soup with garlic, coriander, olive oil and a poached egg. Migas, fried breadcrumbs with pork. Black pork from pigs that fatten on acorns under the cork oaks. Nothing was ever thrown away, least of all stale bread, and the dining rooms upstairs still serve that food under painted ceilings.

Now think about the name of the street. Portas de Santo Antão means the Gates of Saint Anthony, after a gate in the city wall that King Fernando built in the 1370s. For centuries this was the edge of town, where the road from the north arrived... and where travellers wanted a meal and a drink before going in. A little further up stands the Coliseu dos Recreios, a concert hall opened in 1890, so this street has been feeding hungry audiences for well over a century.

So the habit of eating here is older than the touts and the laminated menus. Walk south to the end of the street, where it spills into a small, busy square beside a church. Look for a doorway barely wider than a wardrobe, with a little crowd in front of it, every one of them holding a very small glass.