Ode: All the Sardines in Lisbon

I always bring back a school of canned fish from Portugal after a visit, and right now, I’m sitting on my front stoop in LoHi, eating Bom sardines in olive oil on Triscuits as a late afternoon snack. I’m gonna pin the Denver connection on that and pretend like I’m not breaking the Denverlicious code.

Grilled, canned, with eggs for breakfast, as part of a full-on prato do dia for lunch, or demolished alongside a plastic cup of beer while standing on a street corner at 2am — if you don’t eat sardines in Lisbon every day you’re there, you’re doing it wrong.

This is the real other white meat Americans are missing out on. It’s light and mellow, sustainable, and delicious on its own with just a bit o’ salt and a splash of lemon.

In Portugal, you’ll find sardines everywhere and served all the ways — as sardine toast, sardine pâté, canned sardines with fresh bread, even as tasty tacos. You’ll see them on the menu at the Chinese restaurant, as the daily special in that little Spanish tapas spot on the corner, and prominently on the chalkboard menu at the charming, cheap-ass family-owned joint or the high-end, Michelin-honored trendsetter.

The most traditional preparation is simple and hard to fuck up. Sardinhas assadas is the staple dish everywhere you go, with wafts of charred goodness coming from little outdoor grills as you’re strolling the cobblestone streets, proprietors ducking out of the restaurant to turn the fish.

When served as the prato do dia (plate of the day), your big pile of peixe is usually accompanied by fresh bread and a bowl of olives, a side salad, a carafe of wine, and boiled potatoes.

One late Saturday morning, sitting under an awning and excited for a late breakfast after seeing sardines on the chalkboard and a hibachi on the sidewalk, Señor G and I were told by a tattooed server with a mohawk that they were out. I nearly cried. The server shook her head and told me to order the steak and egg sandwich instead (it was melty and delicious). But just as our food arrived, my pal told me to look behind me.

“But don’t get angry,” he said.

I caught the bistro’s owner layering the baby grill with a half-dozen of the silver fish. She looked at me and smiled sweetly, the wrinkles on her face aligning around her mouth and eyes like soft corduroy.

A passel of middle-aged women had settled in across from us, and the owner and server proceeded to bomb their table with grilled sardines and carafes of white wine. The ladies who brunch were doing it right.

I watched as one of them — long, dark hair streaked with silver — took a piece of bread in her left hand and placed a whole fish on it, then proceeded to use her fingers to pull at the meat and put the white chunks of oiled flesh in her mouth.

“I just got a semi,” I said to my friend.

A week later, a group of us were seated around a folding table on an alley amid a street festival crowd, knocking back liter cups of cheap beer, red wine, and sangria, traditional music pumping around us. It was nearly midnight when our server brought us plates of freshly grilled sardines and thick slices of charred bread, and we set to as if we hadn’t eaten in days. An occasional breeze played across our necks, slightly cooling the close air of the street. The fish was almost too hot to hold, even couched on the warm bread. I demonstrated how the lady at brunch had effortlessly pulled away the charred skin to get to the steamy goodness inside and we all feasted, our fishy fingers smearing the giant Solo cups as we quenched our thirst between bites. It was a bacchanalia of messy food, sticky tables, and loud music — with Smash magically teleporting to dance on the nearby stage as the DJ played her favorite song — and we had to stop by the apartment to wash our hands and faces before heading back out into the packed streets, our stomachs girded for the all-night party ahead of us.

Here at home, with a small stack of flat cans in my pantry after gifting a select few to a select few, I stop and ponder before I flip the key and snick back the sharp metal — then savor each bite with just the right trimmings, imagining myself back in Lisbon with a passel of pals, drunk on the continental lifestyle.