Backstreet and insiders: is this the bitter end of a cultural phenomenon?

With the rise of mass tourism, “secret spots” are now a myth.

This place is, in fact, a best-kept secret serving traditional snack food (here is fried cod). And being a best-kept secret it does not enter into guided tours, guides, or Instagram posts. No, I won’t tell you either.

Do you remember, years ago, when you were finding a “secret spot known only by the locals”, told by a tour guide with a secretive tone? Or written in a media outlet as if that was their latest finding.

How naïve we all were.

Suddenly ventures with titles like “insider”, “backstreet”, “local” or “secret” started popping up everywhere, mainly catering for a wealth of ingenuous tourists looking to maximize their experiences in a short time abroad.

Alas, in the era of mass tourism, the same concepts behind “backstreet” “insider” or “local”, identifiers that are being used widely nowadays mean literally nothing.

On a regular day, under my windows in downtown Lisbon pass an average of thirty to fifty tourist groups: smaller, larger, free, bespoke - and they are only the ones I manage to see while I’m busy with my own life.

Inevitably I hear tropes like “best kept secret”, “locals’ favourite” and so on, usually referring to a neighbourhood restaurant that serves farmed fish straight from the supermarket to the grill, and cheap cuts of meat industrially produced and slapped on charcoal.

I think we all dream of being discoverers of new, uncharted territories.

But as Dr Stanley in Tanzania, we always find dome Dr Livingstone already sitting there.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t “secret” spots or local favourites.

The fact is, they aren’t what you think. In most cases, they aren’t new eateries that have just popped up, smack into an up-and-coming or touristic areas, nor unkempt spaces where all food comes from a supermarket - despite what these guides tout.

Let’s give you another Lisbon-based example to keep in the theme.

Bifanas do Afonso is a “best kept secret” that has gone so mainstream that there are now meters-long queues of foreigners standing in the sun and the rain just to taste a meat-filled bread because they’ve been told it’s special.

They’ve been told locals go here and you can still see some, enjoying a meat-filled bread snack. Tourists have been told that this is a secret spot, unmissable and this makes their senses go oblivious while they queue for hours among their peers.

But none of this is a secret nor a local’s favourite. It used to be, maybe years ago and surely before mainstream media started touting it as the place to be, and before tour guides would identify it (among the dozen similar establishments located in a radius of one km) as THE place where to consume food.

Now locals cannot afford to lose hours queueing alongside the tourists.

It is the same thing that happened with the famous Tram 28: if you stand on any given day at its first stop in Martim Moniz Square, you will see a half-kilometre-long queue of tourists.

Impossible for locals to use it as what it was meant to be: a means of transportation.

Well, this was before it became a trolley ride for the great amusement park that Lisbon is slowly turning into.

No, “best kept secret” is something else.

I can make you a fitting example.

It is a restaurant called Bom de Veras, also in Lisbon.

It sits in a quiet residential neighbourhood without any artistic or touristic interest. Yet, it is frequented by chefs of all shapes, nationalities and types. The affluents and the professionals (from football to business, politics to finance) fill its tables alongside regulars and families.

But it sits absolutely outside the touristic circuit.

Due to its average high ticket, it also sits outside some locals’ possibilities and as it’s not mainstream, journalists targeting tourism (or even gastronomy) don’t talk about it. It’s not new, so journalists don’t talk about it.

But it’s the place to catch everyone (from football players to politicians, chefs to writers) enjoying a simple, homely meal with friends and family.

How come isn’t this place earmarked on one of these “insider/backstreet/secret” guides?

Because putting it very simply, these guides and listicles and writers have an agenda and respond to their own needs and knowledge.

It has always been my biggest pet peeve: the lies told by media and gastro-influencers about “local”, “authentic”, “insider” and “real”.

Also, the moment something is on social media and is advertised to a lot of people one can purchase, by design stops becoming special to become mainstream. Bom de Veras sits too far away from the city centre to ever become hype for tourists, so this is why I speak of it a lot. But there are other places where I go and say nothing. Because I think that what is precious does deserve secrecy, and if you are destined to be in the circle of the ones “in the know” you will eventually end up there.

It’s very simple. It is quite easy to trick people.

The vast majority of people are not gastronomists and for them, food is either a means to refuel energy while visiting a new place, or a small moment to rest and taste some local food with no cultural awareness.

The intrinsic quality of it, or its validity as a cultural phenomenon is not a matter of question when a sunburnt and clogs-wearing individual is quickly refuelling energies between queuing for Tram 28 and the Belem Monastery. All they need is the food that the guide told them to eat or a substitute that is not too foreign to glob down before the next adventure.

And the gastronomists among us?

Learning to assess the quality of food and preparations becomes a very steep learning curve, when we move to another country to study its gastronomy, even for a couple of days.

We abound in enthusiasm but we lack parameters to judge the cuisine, which will usually come over time.

Imagine going to Rome for the first time and eating pasta: the risk you’d bump into a place that serves phoney, touristic crap is very high. The chance you’ll get a table at Matricianella next to a circle of locals, artists and politicians, on the contrary, is quite low.

And yet…