Portuguese Algarve From Top to Bottom Part 2: A Trip in the TARDIS to Visit Food from Out of this World

Looking around, I drank in the view that always gladdens my heart in a restaurant. One that I rarely, if ever, see in the UK. No, not plates of steaming food coming out to tables. Nor bottles and carafes and glasses of various liquids heading likewise. What I love is the sight of the people taking them, the waiters, particularly when not one of them is under fifty years old. It tells a story if you know how to read it. It says that these guys have probably been here most of their working lives. That, in turn, says that they must love their job and their workplace and be valued by it and the customers they serve. That’s probably why I never see it in the UK but let’s not go into that here.

Where are we? Well, we’d been fed high end hote cuisine at Dom Dinis, and now it seems we were going to meet Doctor Who! Yes it’s true. A Portuguese friend said “I’ve booked us a table at The Tardis. It’s real Portuguese rustic food. You’ll love it. It’s the real deal”

So, Sunday lunchtime found us in a taxi heading for the older part of Albufeira town. It disgorged us outside an entrance way with people heading down into I knew not where. To meet the Doctor?

Into The TARDIS

We walked down the entrance way and it opened out into a massive eating space. Ah, THAT’S why they call it The TARDIS. It’s much bigger on the inside than it looks like from the outside.

This is only half of it!

The actual name of the place is Restaurante Churrasqueira Beira and on our visit it looked like half the locals of the town had decided to come here for Sunday lunch. The atmosphere was amazing. A chat with our good friend Nelson and our waiter led me to the one thing on the menu I couldn’t resist Cozido. It’s basically the Portuguese equivalent of the French Pot au Feu. Lumps of, shall we say, the less popular cuts of pig all boiled in a pot with cabbage carrots onions and potatoes. Think real piggy nose to tail and you’re there. Think beardy, scarvy nose to tail and you’re a million miles away. You know the sort of thing;

 “Oh, my nose to tail pig Avacinth. There was fillet, loin, shoulder, leg, cheek and three types of crackling”

Lemmy went for her perennial favourite Liver and Onions or Fígado e Cebolas. A large carafe of their own red wine and a similar one of white, set us up for the treat to come.

By now the place was heaving, all Portuguese, all tucking into this really rustic fare that reminded me of being back in the Testaccio region of Rome eating offal. The waiters were certainly moving now. They knew the large menu intimately and moved with calm assurance through the huge restaurant. It’s a pleasure to watch someone work who’s the master of their art and these boys were certainly that.

After a moderate wait our food arrived:

Cozido

It might look a little unexciting compared to some of the food fashion flying about. But while presentation is always desirable (after all we eat first with our eyes), taste counts overall.

So let me talk you through the plate. Starting at 11 o’clock (on the plate not the time of day) we have: Trotter; Ear and a lump of s]Shoulder. In the middle sits a Chorizo type sausage and a Blood Sausage. All sitting on top of a mound of Cabbage, Carrots and boiled plain Potatoes, all of which had been cooked in the most amazingly fragrant and pungent clear stock.

The joy of the dish was the total pigginess of the taste but also the mix of textures. Trotter gelatinous with a strand of sweet meat running through it. The ear with its bit of cartilage in the middle, not tough but softened through the long slow cook, in the same way shin beef cartilage is in a stew. The pure meat of the shoulder falling apart when you touched it and far better than the current food fad use for shoulder as “pulled pork” and the sausage. Oh, the sausage! Both came in a skin of intestine of course. There was a bit of heat from the chorizo but the soft, soft texture of the blood sausage stole the show…and my heart. Even the veg was excellent. Lemmy will be the first to tell you that veg in our house is the tale of the original Jack Spratt and his wife in that I only eat it half raw because any other way takes me straight back to hated school dinners, and she likes it so overdone (sorry dear, well cooked) that if you laid a fork gently on it, it would continue on through to the plate.

Well, the veg here was well chosen to stand a long cook (white cabbage, whole carrot, whole potato) but they were softer than I would ever normally eat. The fact they’d been cooked in that gorgeous stock almost made them the star of the show. I’ve yet to find a place that does simple potatoes better than Portugal, I’ve decided it must be the soil and these were no exception. And the soft cabbage, far from taking me back to Mrs. Grimgob the dinner lady standing over me with a resolute “one more mouthful!” ringing in my ears, made me change my preferred cabbage cooking method overnight. For me, no more finely shredded Savoy steamed or briefly sauteed in oil. Now it’s white cabbage cooked till soft in a well made stock. Heresy!!! The only drawback? Well, you don’t eat meat like this with a knife and fork and afterwards, despite numerous hand washings, my fingers kept sticking to each other spontaneously for the next couple of days or so.

Lemmy and the Liver and Onions? Well all I can say is they didn’t last long. Not mash but the same plain boiled potatoes, the contented mewlings to my left told their own story. Hell, since my epiphany with offal in Rome I even tried a bit and it was lovely. I couldn’t eat a lot, I’m still a recent initiate remember, but that was never going to happen anyway unless I got a sudden urge to try freshly severed testicle as well.

Liver ‘n’ Onions

So a lifetime ambition to visit the Tardis fulfilled. I suspect we were fed a lot better here than we would’ve been in the real thing and I don’t really care for that new fella who’s driving it now anyway.

We left with a bit of a Robert Palmer song running through my mind:

“Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the news I got a bad case o’ lovin’ you!!!”