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| Alfama After Dark: dinner at the Casa da Tia Helena |
Time for one of the greatest uses of the internet: posting pictures of food.
First course: octopus salad:
Let me tell you. This octopus salad was huge. There must have eight more pusses in this salad. It was much more of a meal salad than an appetizer salad. It had a nice vinegary taste to it. So good. If I had stopped there, I would've had a nice delicious filling meal. But, of course, I did not stop there. I had a main course:
Bacalhau com broa. With a side salad (a clue that the octopus salad was not meant to be eaten as an appetizer salad) and potatoes.
What is bacalhau com broa? Salted cod with cornbread. That doesn't sound good, does it. It's basically tasty pieces of dried cod mixed into southern-style cornbread dressing. Sounds better now, doesn't it? It was unexpectedly awesome. I washed it down with a local beer, Sangres. It was ... umm ... not awesome. Almost Coors-ian in its blandness. It was so bland that if you threw a lime in it, you could sell it as Corona. Well, to be fair, it wasn't QUITE that bland.
I can guarantee you this was no over-priced tourist trap. This was the real deal. Real local food for real local people. And only one tourist crashing the local scene in a sad and desperate search for authenticity.
Well, in regards to authenticity: Found it!
Time to wander the one-block walk (uphill both ways!) from Casa da Tia Helena to my hotel, the Hotel Convento do Salvador.
No. I was not so overloaded with cornbread and cod that it was morning by the time I stumbled back to my hotel. The pic was snapped earlier in the day, but in terms of the narrative, the pics fit here.
Very very nice small hotel, of about 50 rooms.
Fifty SMALL rooms. The bed is basically the entire bedroom, which, really, is good enough. Plus the mattress was comfortable and the room clean. I like these European boutique hotels where they gut some old building, keep the older facade, but the interior is all modern hotel. It's a nice way to combine old and new.
