You know you’re in a touristy part of Portugal when there is signage around the food. (The same applies to driving signs. But I digress.)
There are, officially, three meals in Portugal:
- Pequeno almoço (breakfast) which is small and basic, usually milk, coffee, bread rolls/toast, butter/jam. Portuguese are not early risers, so breakfast is typically the quickest meal of the day. Brunch as a concept is picking up steam in Lisbon, but mostly unheard of unless in an area with lots of tourists and/or expats.
- Almoço (lunch) is the main meal of the day, and this is much more social. You won’t see workers eating sandwiches at their desks here. Instead, everyone goes out for a hot meal and takes long, leisurely lunches with wine. Restaurants fill up around 12:30 and go strong until around 2pm. Unless you’re in a sizeable city, find a restaurant by 2pm or you’ll be searching for a café or padaria (bakery). Note: the Portuguese don’t siesta. It’s back to work after lunch.
- Jantar (dinner) is usually served late in the evening, depending on the area. The dinner crowd may start trickling in about 8pm, and fill up around 8:30pm. On weekends it’s often later, towards 9:30 or 10pm, but not as late as the Spanish.
Don’t skip lunch! Dinner is much later than is custom for most of the continent, and the English-speaking world. Those six hours or so can feel very long when you’re hungry.
Unofficially, there is a fourth meal to tide you over in the afternoon and it comes with the rather confusing name of lanche (LAN-cheh), not to be confused with ‘lunch’. It means ‘snack’ and these snacks come in all shapes and sizes, savoury and sweet: bite-sized deep-fried tidbits to small sandwiches to baked goods like pastries and small cakes. Lanche is also the name of a snack sandwich with thinly-sliced meat and cheese baked into it. Yes, lanche at lanche. You’ll see an example of it in the next picture below.
While display cases are helpful, I understand fully the intimidation at the counter for newcomers trying to parse the wide array of food items behind the glass. Unless you understand high-speed Portuguese, any general inquiry along the lines of “What is that?” won’t get you far. Even now, after a lot of practice ordering food, I won’t understand all the names I’m given. So what I do now is to narrow it down from the start, especially since one of my early mistakes is that I accidentally bought meat-filled pastries for a vegetarian. I’ve also accidentally bought sweet instead of savoury pastries.
For the savouries you’ll hear words like rissois, croquettes, chamuças, bolinhas, pataniscas, and pão de ___, and except for the last expression the fillings may not be mentioned as part of the name. Here are some common words to ask if you want to know what’s inside, starting with generic words and common examples in parentheses:
carne = meat (salchisa/hot dog, bife/beef, chouriço/cured sausage, fiambre/ham, porco/pork, leitão/roasted pork)
peixe = fish (battered and fried bacalhau/codfish or pescada/hake are typical lanche items)
mariscos = seafood (commonly camarão or gambas/shrimp)
vegetais = vegetables (or you’ll hear vegetariano/vegetarian)
queijo = cheese
The doces/sweets names you’ll see: tarte or tartelete, bolo (exceptions are bola de carne which translates into “meat cake” and bolo de carne which is meatloaf) or bolinha (also used for savouries), and pastel, which is also used for some savouries like Pastel de Chaves. Note that a Portuguese croissant is not like a French croissant — the Portuguese version is heaver, baked dough rather than flaky pastry made with butter.
If you’re vegan, you won’t need to learn another word — the Portuguese word is nearly the same: vegan or vegano.
Happy lanche-ing!
December 11, 2015
Album: Portugal [Autumn 2015]
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