Comfort and craft: the dining room at Lisboeta
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)To be in an unfamiliar restaurant, and to find myself ever so slightly lost on the way to the loo, is not an alien sensation. I have blundered into dormant private dining rooms and pushed the door open on startled pot washers in basement kitchens. There is a particular London hotel where I remember the toilets basically being in a neighbouring postcode, accessed only via a network of winding corridors possibly stalked by a minotaur.
But at Lisboeta, former Chiltern Firehouse mastermind Nuno Mendes’ intensely personal new restaurant in Fitzrovia, this familiar scenario played out with a fresh resonance. In fact as I wandered from the darkened thrum of its three-storey location — struggling for a moment to locate bathrooms that are only hinted at by a sign for a yet-to-open chef’s table area — the sense of pleasant disorientation seemed almost intentional. It seemed, in truth, to set the tone for an experience that, from the vintage port adverts on the walls to the pork fat-set custard among the puddings, felt like a gently uncompromising, glorious odyssey into an untrammelled new world of Portuguese cuisine. Make no mistake, Lisboeta (which means person from Lisbon) is a fresh angle on a city which lots of people think they know.
