Disappointment is the mother of experimentation. And so, thoroughly disappointed, I experimented.
My wife Yulia and I had spent the morning up in Caminha, along Portugal’s northern border with Spain. She was shopping for vintage clothes at a weekend market in a park in the center of town, and I was parked at an al fresco cafe, writing on my phone, an espresso and pastel de nata nearby.
Back in 2024, I told International Living readers that “Caminha is a holdover of Portugal before tourism and modernity swept over Lisbon, the Algarve, and Porto.” That’s still true.
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(And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Last year, Real Estate Trend Alert Founder (RETA) Ronan McMahon bought a historic mansion here himself. Point is, the north still feels like the real Portugal.)
“I’m hungry,” I heard from behind, the accent unmistakably Slavic.
I looked back to see Yulia and said, “Giddy up, girl. Let’s go eat.”
A couple minutes later we were sitting inside Duque de Caminha - a stone-walled eatery with a vibe that says conquistadors might have noshed here back in the day.
We like this place. We often pop in for lunch, sometimes dinner when we overnight at the nearby Design & Wine Hotel.
The food is fab.
The wine selection is equally fab – bottles in wooden boxes nailed to the walls, each section a different Portuguese varietal.
And the waiter is the most hospitable service worker in all of Europe. An exaggeration probably, but I’m sticking with that assessment.
In my three years living in Portugal, I’ve grown so fond of assado cabrito no forno (slow-roasted kid goat) that mama goats across Portugal are rightly concerned about their offspring.
It was on the menu and I eagerly ordered it.
“Ahh, no. Didn’t cook today,” the waiter told me. “Try the arroz de tamboril?” He offered a chef’s kiss salute.
It’s here in our story that you need to be made aware of an ugly truth.
Tamboril – aka, monkfish - is the homeliest of all sea creatures. I see them in every supermarket fish counter. At every fishmonger. They look like the undersea version of a serial killer, slimy and in need of orthodontic care.
Thing is, I’m an adventurous eater. Fried scorpions in China. Alligator in Louisiana. Bear In Sweden. Haggis in Scotland. Some kind of beef tongue thing Yulia sometimes cooks when she’s lost her mind. I’ll pretty much try anything once.
But I’ve always said no to tamboril on every menu in Portugal - and it’s on a lot of Portuguese menus. Maybe I’m fish-shaming, but in a world of salmon and yellowtail sushi, hideous is no way to go through life as a menu item.
I scrunched up my nose.
Yulia saw.
“We’ll try the tamboril,” she told the waiter. He smiled.
“Bom,” came his reply. “Good.”
I’ll save you the suspense. Arroz de tamboril is fantastic.
“Oh my god,” I said to Yulia. “This is Louisiana! This is crawfish etouffee, just not as spicy and with the wrong fish.”
It was then that I came to a realization three years in the making: A lot of Portuguese cooking—a lot of Portuguese dishes—are Iberian replicas of the foods my granny fed me growing up in south Louisiana.
There was the arroz de pato (duck rice) I had at a tiny lunchtime hangout for locals in a Porto neighborhood. Identical to the chicken and sausage jambalaya my best friend’s mom used to make—just with a quacker not a clucker.
The arroz de feijao (beans and rice) I ordered at a vineyard restaurant in the Alentejo wine region was a doppelgänger to my granny’s red beans and rice, just absent the andouille sausage and the creaminess that comes from mashing some of the red beans as they cook.
The feijoada à Transmontana that Yulia and I shared at some rustic family joint in the mountains northeast of Braga held the DNA of the Cajun white bean & pork stew my ex-wife’s grandfather used to make.
And then there was the grilled chourico assado no barro (clay-roasted chorizo sausage) I had while wandering around some random neighborhood in northern Lisbon. The chorizo was literally on fire, flames from some kind of alcohol in the clay bowl nearly singed my eyebrows. No way that passes legal muster anywhere in America. But the taste recalled long-yellowed memories of sausages grilling at innumerable tailgate parties before all the too-many-to-count LSU football games I’ve attended in my life.
That’s the joy of traveling the world… stumbling upon new dishes that are the ghosts of the dishes you grew up with.
It’s particularly true here in Europe because so much of America’s regional cuisines trace their family tree back to some region of France, or Italy, or old Bohemia or wherever. Louisiana, with its history of slavery, shares a cookbook with Spain, Portugal, and all the African colonies that were all part of the slave trade and which melted into the Cajun and Creole foods that were normal, everyday fare for me.
So, next time you are outside America, experiment with your food selection. You don’t have to order fried scorpions, but go beyond your comfort zone. Because even the world’s ugliest fish makes a helluva good Cajun meal here in Portugal.
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