Lisbon, 27.12.2024: Lamb Tagine and Sintra Sights

Sintra, view up shopping lane in old city 

Christmas dinner at Flor da Laranja Moroccan restaurant, 206 R. da Rosa in the Bairro Alto: my initial impression after we’d gone there was that it was a delightful experience. Now, in retrospect, I’m questioning that impression. This is what I posted about it on Facebook:

We had Christmas dinner at a small Moroccan restaurant not far from our hotel in Lisbon, Flor da Laranja in the Bairro Alto. I won't bore you with a lot of photos — but am sharing a sampler below.

Flor da Laranja was one of the few places we could find that were open for Christmas, and it has very good recommendations, so we picked it. I'm very glad we did. The food was wonderful, as was the atmosphere and whole experience. 

Chef-owner Rabea Esserghini treats you as though you've walked into her own home, makes you welcome and comfortable as a guest, does all the cooking for everyone who comes to her restaurant. When we arrived, a little plate of appetizers was sitting on the table, a soft cheese on a crispy flatbread and tuna spiced with cumin, also on a flatbread, garnished with mint.

We then asked her about a strong red Douro wine, and she chose a bottle for us, and we ordered — lamb tagine with artichokes for Steve, chicken and couscous for me. For appetizers, we had dolmas and hummus, both spectacular. The hummus was lemony and aromatic with cumin. The main dishes came with an array of mezes — spinach in lemon sauce, eggplant in tomato sauce, chopped sweet potatoes with honey and spice, and a dish of fava beans and olives in olive oil and herbs.

The cost of this wonderful meal was less than half of what it would have been in a comparable US restaurant, and the food would not have been half as good, the whole experience (except for a hostile, haughty French family dining near us) not half as good in an American restaurant.

Flor da Laranja restaurant, 206 R. da Rosa, Bairro Alto

Table setting with Douro wine, Flor da Laranja restaurant, 206 R. da Rosa, Bairro Alto

Lamb tagine with artichokes, Flor da Laranja restaurant, 206 R. da Rosa, Bairro Alto

Chicken couscous, Flor da Laranja restaurant, 206 R. da Rosa, Bairro Alto

Mezes, Flor da Laranja restaurant, 206 R. da Rosa, Bairro Alto

But in retrospect, I’m wondering if the food was really as good as I had thought. Steve’s tagine was good, but she had promised that it would be “spicy,” and it was to my palate relatively bland. My chicken and couscous dish couldn’t have been blander, though she spoke of it as “spicy,” too. I now realize she seemed unenthusiastic when I ordered it, and suspect that she was focusing on tagines and thought all her guests would do the same. The two main dishes took an inordinate amount of time to come to us, and I think perhaps the chicken was the holdup, that something about it was not ready and required work she hadn’t expected to do.

I also noticed that when we asked R. Esserghini to choose a bottle of strong red Douro wine for us, the bottle she chose, Quinta la Rosa, was at the top end of the price range of Douro reds on her menu at €24. So I wonder if we got taken advantage of, at least a little bit, and have a somewhat sour feeling as I look back on the evening.

Maybe this is churlish. She was genuinely welcoming and nice. The way a French-speaking family stopped talking and all turned to glare at us when we walked in cast something of a pall on the evening, though, from the outset — and for this, Ms. Esserghini cannot be blamed. They were truly ugly people, in contrast to a Spanish couple who arrived past 8 P.M. and whom Ms. Esserghini seated next to us, chiding them with an ai yai yai! because their reservations had been for 7:30. And she spoke not Spanish to them but French….

So that was Christmas dinner.

On the 26th, we took the train to Sintra about 11 A.M., arriving there shortly before noon. On the train was a family from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, who had been in Lisbon several days and were going to spend two nights in Sintra. The mother of the family sat in the seats across from us, and somehow Steve divined that she was from Canada and struck up a conversation with her. 

The conversation was desultory and nice, ranging from Trump (she didn’t like him and said “Canadians” abhorred him, which is not quite true) to the years we spent in Toronto to what we’d seen and done in Lisbon. The family seem to be energetic travelers. If there’s a sight to see, they see it. So of course they’d been to Belém and dutifully went to the tower, while we skipped doing so (and should be faulted for our laziness), to the high overlook in the Alfama, etc. We told her we’d seen the tower via Rick Steves, and she said that she loves him, and also someone who shares travel videos on YouTube. I think the name was Mark Walters. 

Yes, I see that Mark Walters is a Brit, who’s written a book called Footloose. Or did she mean the Mark Wolters who’s an American and does travel videos on YouTube? I tend to think that’s the man the Canadian lady meant, since she specifically mentioned that he does YouTube videos. His YouTube channel is called Wolters World and has a lot of those videos that tell you what to do and not to do in particular countries.

View of castle from below, Sintra 

Sintra: beautiful. But maddening, aswarm with tourists from all over the world, Eurotrash and whatever variety of trash the others happen to belong to. The moment you get off the train and start walking towards the old city center, hawkers descend on you trying to cajole you into taking a guided tour, a taxi, this or that — all with absolutely no consideration for your personal space and with no evident respect for you as someone clearly disinterested in engaging them. 

This shadowed the Sintra experience from the outset, and I was already tired and out of sorts, since I had slept poorly after eating a heavy meal late in the evening the night before. So we decided we’d simply take a turn around the old city and call that a tour, then return on the train and rest in our hotel room.

Monument to Doctor Gregorio Rafael da Silva d'Almeida, Sintra

Fonte Mourisca, Sintra

Once we got past the hawkers, vendors, detritus, marketing lice swarming those leaving the train station, the walk was actually very pleasant, along a park with interesting artwork every few yards and spectacular views up to the castle. The old city is beautiful but heavily, heavily tourist-oriented, with shops full of tourist tat and restaurants with signs saying in English, “Authentic traditional Portuguese food.”

Sintra town hall palace and 

We asked a local about a place to eat fish, and she recommended a restaurant with bacalhau in its name, telling us it was just up a laneway to our right. We followed the lane but couldn’t see the sign for the restaurant which we had glimpsed from lower down, and when we finally found it, it turned out to be closed, with unfriendly workmen inside who refused to acknowledge our presence when we asked if the place was open or closed.

We spotted a quiet place near that one with a few people sitting at outside tables and more inside, and decided we’d light there. It was run by an Indian man and offered a disparate array of things to eat from döner kebabs and falafels to hamburgers and pastéis de bacalhau. Steve took the latter and I ordered a falafel plate. With that, we had a bottle of sparkling water, one of still water, a glass of white wine (Steve), and a glass of Super Bock beer.

When the food came at long last, I found I couldn’t eat much, since we’d had breakfast late in the morning. The falafels were not very good, and I passed most of them to Steve to wrap in a napkin and put in his carry-bag so we might eat them in the evening. The salad of lettuce, tomato, and onion with a vinaigrette dressing that came with them appealed to me, and I ate that with relish, and too many of the french fries that also came with the plate. In the evening when he unwrapped the falafels, Steve declared them too greasy and discarded them, and he was right: badly fried, rather tasteless with little taste of cumin, flat (literally so) and insipid.

So that was Sintra. It was nice to see something outside Lisbon and the city itself is beautiful, but the tourist orientation is really off-putting. 

Time Out Market, Mercado da Ribeira, 24 Av. de Julho

Susana Felicidade restaurant, Time Out Market

Sardines on toast with tomatoes, shrimp in butter sauce, Susana Felicidade restaurant

Oysters and cod in cream sauce, Susana Felicidade restaurant

Today, after we’d had breakfast, we took the blue line of the Metro and then the green one to the Time Out Market at Ribeira, the Mercado da Ribeira at 24 Av. de Julho. That was a nice outing, walking around in the spacious food hall and seeing the menus of all the different restaurants offering items to eat there. We opted for several seafood dishes at Susan Felicidade’s restaurant — prawns in a butter sauce, sardines in tomato sauce on toast, oysters, and cod in a creamy sauce with some sort of julienned vegetable in it, perhaps celery root? 

Honestly, nothing struck me as especially good. The best thing about the lunch was the two generous glasses of cold, refreshing vinho verde we ordered with the seafood.

We topped that repast off with gelato at Gelato Daverro — a cup with scoops of pistachio, hazelnut, and coffee — and then ordered two pastéis de nata from a little bakery place called Manteigaria that claimed to make authentic traditional pastéis. I could eat only a bite of one, and it was fine, with a good crunchy pastry shell. The gelato was good, too. 

And now back in our hotel room packing for our early morning departure. I heard Steve order a taxi for 5:30 A.M. though our flight is not until 10:30. He’s obsessive about being at the airport hours early, and maybe he’s right, since you never know what can happen with a flight, especially an international one. Even so, I doubt we’ll sleep much this evening with departure anxiety roiling inside us. And weather reports say very bad weather will unfold across the southern US tomorrow with many flights already being cancelled.