A Short Guide to Chinese Dining in Lisbon

Yours truly very partial guide to the best, the strangest, and the most flavourful Chinese dining in portugal - specifically, in Lisbon

Last year on Oltre in Baccalá, my blog about Portugal gastronomy, we delved into the topic dear to me of the gastronomic relations between Portugal and Japan, and we went to discover the Nanban cuisine in Lisbon.

We also went to peek into the gastronomic relations between Goa and Portugal, in a beautiful adventure that also took us for a gastronomic walk through the streets of the Mouraria in Lisbon.

This year we are going to discover Cathay: we go to and from China, and we discover the cuisine of Macao and the various Chinese cuisines present in Lisbon.

Get your chopsticks ready!

For recommendations that are always on point, journalist Ricardo Felner is the man to turn to. No one knows how to explore the soft underbelly of Lisbon like him. He is not very interested in the fine dining scene: Felner travels miles in search of the best of the best in terms of cuisine that we can define as “ethnic”: Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, Lebanese… everything and more. He knows it all. If you are organizing a gastronomic trip to Lisbon to learn about the latest in this field, I recommend you - as well as Gambero Rosso or other Italian newspapers - to hire Felner instead of TikTok.

This post was triggered a bit in the wake of the intellectual and cultural poverty represented by a rather unfortunate Instagram post by Gambero Rosso, a small jumble of clichés, banalities and inaccuracies written/filmed by someone who did not know where he was, nor what he was eating, nor why - the point on which this entire blog hinges.

I won't dwell on the fact that it seems sad for an authoritative "house" like Gambero Rosso, to fall into inaccuracies, TikTok videos and banalities.

Here we ask ourselves instead why eat Chinese in Lisbon?

Because it's really good: after Paris and London, in Europe the outpost of the Rising Sun is Lisbon.