Vienna has coffee culture. Lisbon has coffee. The distinction matters. In Vienna, the coffee house is a social institution with a hundred and fifty years of tradition behind it. You sit for hours. You read a newspaper. The waiter leaves you alone. The coffee is a ritual that comes with a glass of water. It…
Two years in Lisbon and I have eaten in enough places to know that the expensive restaurants near the Tagus are not where Lisbon’s food actually lives. This is not a discovery — every local knows it. But arriving from Vienna, where a Gasthaus is as respectable as a Michelin-starred restaurant, it took me longer…
I moved to Mouraria because that was where I could find a flat. A former colleague told me that for a first apartment in Lisbon, location was secondary to getting something that existed. She was right. But after two years I know where I would go next, and it is one of two places depending…