Vittles Reviews: A weekend in London’s Little Portugal
Searching for the Lost Espetada, by Bartolomeo Sala. Photographs by Tommaso Serra.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. If you missed this week’s podcast with chef Will Gleave, you can listen to it here or watch it here. In today’s restaurant newsletter, Bartolomeo Sala writes about a culinary tour through London’s Little Portugal, looking for the Madeiran specialty of espetada.
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To live in London means to be well-acquainted with loss. Neighbourhoods change at breakneck speed, restaurants come and go, and what has always been there can disappear in just a few years. Little Portugal is a notable exception. Beginning from the late 1980s, this cluster of cafés, bars and restaurants packed tightly around South Lambeth Road in Stockwell – but with a few outposts scattered around Vauxhall and Brixton – became the preferred destination for Madeiran immigrants who, like their fellow Portuguese from the mainland, flocked to London to work in construction, hospitality and domestic work.
Today, it’s calculated that around 120,000 Madeirans live in the city, although a huge chunk of this sizable population has moved to the suburbs. Still, with its daily rituals and local characters, Little Portugal retains its village vibe, which is all the more unlikely given the skyscrapers looming threateningly in the background.
On a recent Friday evening in July, just before the Spain vs. Belgium World Cup quarter-final, the atmosphere in Little Portugal feels vaguely Iberian. Over bottles of Sagres and Super Bock, we quiz the people sitting and standing in front of The Hideout, one of the neighbourhood’s many all-day operations, as to where to go to eat the best espetada, Madeira’s quintessential beef skewer. There was a time when, like Italians looking for a taste of Southern Europe, we would come to Little Portugal often, and espetada was our preferred choice. Since then, our favourite taberneiro, a short bald guy in skinny jeans called Pedro, has packed it in to head back to the motherland. (Or some say Clapham. Nobody actually knows.)
Eventually, we approach a group of builders who all turn out to be from Madeira. In my broken Portuñol (a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish), I turn to the most charismatic of the bunch, Abel Luis. While showing us a picture of four skewers bending under the weight of the thick chunks of beef, he tells us, ‘The best espetada is the one you make at home, threaded onto a bay branch and cooked over the grill.’
So we decided to begin an espetada tour. Much of the existing food writing on Little Portugal treats its establishments as cheap, fundamentally interchangeable places to drink. And sure, with the World Cup in full swing, we drank a fair bit. However, over the weekend, during which we ate four different meals in as many restaurants, we learned that to sell the neighbourhood as a pitstop for drinks was to sell it short. Yes, we did eat plenty of espetada, but we also met the people who have made the neighbourhood what it is today and tried a few regional specialities we hadn’t heard of. To cap it all off, we had a memorable lunch in the unlikeliest of places.
Behind the paywall: the people of Little Portugal, recommendations for four of the area’s restaurants, including what might be its best espetada, plus an outstanding bonus dish of slow cooked kid goat.