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.
It is also an inordinately sexy restaurant. Only in its second week when we visited for a late-ish dinner, the room already had the palpable, crackling buzz of an instant hit. Up at the long limestone counter that sweeps through the ground floor area, it was all beautiful people raising white port and tonics, Spanish men slurping at roasted scarlet prawn heads with grisly abandon and Nuno himself, ferrying dishes from the open kitchen and looking, with his long streaked beard, beatific smile and forearm tattoos, like a kindly shaman.
The early dishes didn’t sour the mood. Starting with a plate of soft sheep’s cheese struck me, initially, as a little like conducting a meal in reverse. But once it was brought to us — oozy, hypnotically creamy little wedges of ripe Azetão, ably abetted by glossy, ruffled scrims of sweet “copita” charcuterie — any misgivings melted away. Vindalho pork pie, delicately crumbly and gently spiced, was no slouch either. And if you are wondering at this point whether Lisboeta’s secret weapon is literally just wanging pork into things then, well, you are only half right. Though yes, there is also a whipped pork lard that you’re encouraged to smear onto slabs of Coombesehead Farm bread, this being a safe environment where that sort of goblin mode behaviour is condoned.
But this is counterbalanced by the vividly creative treatment of vegetables. And the unusual application of eggs — whether it is a yolk enriching a tangle of exquisitely meaty mushrooms in a bready, herbal açorda sauce, or chopped, hard-boiled egg dressing an exceptional asparagus and wild garlic dish — turns out to be the kitchen’s most effective culinary motif. In fact, I might even go as far as saying that the meaty supposed centrepiece of our meal — a perfectly pleasant, spoonably tender lamb shoulder and red wine stew — felt, after everything that came before it, a little heavy and indistinct.
Thankfully we were able to rally for a shared scoop of abade de priscos: aka “that” pork fat-set custard. Milky pale, dressed in olive oil, and adrift in a puddle of port caramel, it is one of the more utterly breathtaking things I’ve ever eaten; an intensely creamy tussle of salty and sweet, with a jolting richness that penetrates the very soul. It really is abominably good — an early candidate for dish of the year. But, more than that, it has a joyful fearlessness and subtle skill that encapsulates what makes Lisboeta such a success.
Mendes has collapsed the best bits of a beloved city’s eating culture into a single restaurant, while also honouring comfort, craft and personal connection. It may be a love letter to the city of his birth. But I have a feeling that it is London that’s about to fall hard.
