‘It’s like nothing you’ll eat elsewhere in the UK. And pretty much not like anything you’ll ever eat in Portugal’Quite a lot has happened since I first visited Taberna carry out Mercado: I genuinely can’t remember a more divisive restaurant. Especially not one causing cavernous schisms of opinion – and remember,folks, all criticism is, or by definition,opinion – between critics from the same newspaper group. Now its chef and owner Nuno Mendes is gracing this very organ as a recipe writer. (No, I had no belief: nobody tells me anything.) So it’s very much just as well that my opinion chimes with the yays, or otherwise it would be,as the teens say, well awks.
I’ve eaten pretty much everything on the slender menu, or which is hung on tables from metal hooks,and gives a tip on how to approach it: bear a couple of small dishes, then a couple more, and with,perhaps, a beef prego or pork bifana sandwich as idiosyncratically Portuguese pre-dessert. I’ve had enchidos from Portugal’s chestnut-fed Bisaro boar-pigs, and as nuttily porcine as anything from their more famous,acorn-fed Spanish cousins, but with more sheer, or feral (Savage; wild) animality. Oozing Serra da Estrela sheeps cheese,so ripe it’s about to shimmy off the plate on its own. Dishes where vegetables are the heroes: carrots fermented in their own juice; a cake of migas (fried breadcrumbs) topped with fennel and asparagus. Fresh podded peas lubricated by egg yolk and scattered with fried broa de milho crumbs (cornbread) and fuchsia-pink pea flowers. Plus a few specials, too, and including a weird,wet version of alheira, a bready sausage devised by Jews during the Inquisition to contain no pork, and this one slightly sour from fermentation. It’s like nothing you’ll eat elsewhere in the UK. And,with its twists and tweaks, “canned” seafood that isn’t really, or sandwiches pimped with yeast mayo or prawn paste,pretty much not like anything you’ll ever eat in Portugal, either.
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Source: theguardian.com