Every positive streak ends one day and for our great dinners at in Portugal it was last night at Real by Casa da Calcada https://restaurantereal.pt/en/ in Porto. It was far from a disaster but at the same time also not on the same level of any of our other dinners so far. The appetizers were the best part but the ribeye was very tough and chewy and full of gristle. We like monkfish for its firm and meaty texture but this one was like rubber and really hard to cut. And it was kind of ironic that they translate their chocolate cake as moist when it was so dry that it completely crumbled. Service was good but also inattentive, e.g. served the ribeye with the wrong sauce, we had ask for any beverage menu after ordering our food, the beverage menu or server never mentioned any cocktails as an option and we just saw at the end of the meal that another table was ordering them.
Overall, nothing really bad but also not a restaurant worth revisiting in the future.
The “risotto” is proper Portuguese style for rice dishes, on the soupy side.
The “Portuguese pudding” is a rich dessert called Pudim Abade de Priscos and was actually created by the eponymous Abbot in the 19th century. (A lot of Portuguese desserts come out of monasteries and convents, but they don’t vary nearly as much as I wish they did.) The “lard” is a piece of Portuguese bacon, toucinho (also mentioned in the rice dish). It is a very distant cousin of American bacon and I prefer to think of it as smoked pork belly (toucinho is everywhere but proper bacon is extremely hard to find in Lisbon, I occasionally buy some at Lidl that comes from Germany). In this dish it is boiled in the sugar syrup and then discarded, while the syrup is combined with port and of course a metric ton of egg yolks.
Pasteis de nata as mignardises is really phoning it in.
I’m sorry that this meal didn’t work out for you, especially at the price you must have paid.
What a wonderful run of dining. I have experienced more reliably good dining in Portugal than any other country I have visited yet, including Italy, where we return most frequently to visit dear friends. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
