We travel for lots of different reasons. Adventure, relaxation, work, family. Although we didn’t know why when we planned this trip a year ago, we know now. Recovery.
LaCompanige is a boutique French airline with just a few routes, one of them being Newark to Paris. Their hook is that they take Airbus A321 NEOs and outfit them with just 78 full laydown business class seats. This, and the fantastic discounts they were offering both fit nicely into our current long haul flight strategy: find the cheapest business class flight into the general region, then take the cheap-o shuttles to our final destination. It allows us to sleep as comfortably as possible on overnight flights and add another destination to each trip. Hence our Portugal trip became our Portugal Paris trip.
The flight is a very civilized affair from the get-go. Separate zippy lane through EWR Terminal B security. Lounge & Co. – that’s the super creative name for their hospitality suite – during the wait for a nosh and a few drinks. Boarding takes all of 10 minutes. As we settle into our pods, we’re welcomed with nice flutes of champaign served by an attractive staff with French accents. It’s the 60s, and we’re getting to fly Pan-Am. Push away right at 7pm and it’s the fastest gate-to-sky we’ve ever experienced.
Bong. Seat
belt light goes off, dinner is served. Salmon for Mandy, duck for me, both very nice
and paired with some excellent vintage wine.
Lie back, sync up a movie on our screens and doze through the ether into another
world.
We land at Paris Orly, which is nice for not having to deal
with the giant habitrails and decaying infrastructure that is Charles De Gaul
airport. Another cut-the-line lane for
us through security, then a bit of hang time for our connecting flight. TAP Air Portugal is a basic as it gets, but it’s clean and efficient. Two hour hop, no wait at the Thrifty desk and
we’re down the road in a black Renault Captur crossover.
In no time flat we’re in Baixa, in the bustling hub of one of the world’s busiest travel destinations. It’s Wednesday noon and the happy energy is palpable as we get our first time in Lisbon.
We’re starving so we aim for Lisbon’s king of
street food. Philly has cheesesteaks (of
course the best version of food-define-city-define-food on the planet.) Rajkovich has hot dogs. Venice does fried seafood in a paper cone. Here it’s the bifana, tender, thin sliced
pork marinated in white wine, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, paprika and chili
powder, then lightly fried in lard then slow cooked with the leftover marinade
in giant pans. Stick that into a perfect
Portuguese roll, crusty out, fluffy in, add a little mustard or chili oil and a
cold beer chaser. An no better place to
sample this delicacy the Bifanas of Afonso, 30 minute line be damned. You don’t have to know what a good bifana
tastes like to know that this is a great one.
It would be like having your first car be a Porsche 911. You don’t have any other reference, but you
just know that it’s not going to get better than this.
We check into the Eurostars Lisboa Baixa Hotel, a swank city joint just a few blocks from the river, and crash for an hour or so. Then we’re back out on tonight’s adventure, a walking food tour. Our affable host Daniel starts with a little history of the country and weaves the evolution of the cuisine through the story of Portugal’s politics, conquests, defeats ad explorations. Some highlights from the tour:
- There is such a thing as “green wine”. You can get it in the most basic establishments. It’s a distinctly herbal white wine from the rainy, or green, region of northeast Portugal. It’s not famous for a reason.
- All bifanas are not created equal. Having now tried 2 examples, we can clearly classify ourselves as The Authority in the Bifanious arts. Isn’t that how the interweb works?
- Salt cod is pretty much the national dish of Portugal, even though there is not a swimming cod withing thousands of nautical miles from here.
- Apparently, if you mess with a completely unappetizing raw ingredient for enough centuries, you can finally figure out a few pretty good recipes.
- If you smash a thousand years of world exploration into a single piece of dough, fold it like a newspaper hat and deep fry it, you get a samosa.
- They have a thing for ceramic penises in this country, especially if they are very big and filled with ginjinha, that syrupy Portuguese liquor that tastes like the inside of those individually wrapped chocolate coved cherries they used to sell near the cash register at the supermarket.
- Canadian honeymooners, especially those named Barbara and Hamilton, are a lot of fun to hang out with.
- French chefs can make anything taste good, even blood sausage.
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