Savoring the Lonely Lunch and Bacalhau in Portugal

Reedsy Story December 19, 2025:

Savoring the Lonely Lunch and Balalhau in Portugal

by LYNN ADLER

It’s been many years since I sat alone under the awning at a sidewalk café for a leisurely interlude to my group tour of Portugal. We had stopped at the seaside town of Cascais outside of Lisbon. Everyone scattered around the marina area. There was a promise of shopping too, but I sought out a good place to eat lunch. I wandered into a small dark entrance with a bar on one side. They were used to tourists now. The host quickly appeared and assessed the situation. Not too many people in Portugal at the time spoke English. It had only been a handful of years since the country opened to the west after the end of the dictatorship but they were already eager to embrace us.

They thought that I might like to sit outside and they were right. There was basically one thing on the menu but in many different forms: Bacalhau.

I can still pronounce the word. I wanted to remember the name and then savor this dish that I had never heard of: Basically it is salted and dried cod fish. Does it sound appetizing? It does not. I’ve heard two things: The Portuguese fish for it off their coast but it also comes from Norway, which is pretty far away, but over centuries the mixing of people from different countries was the result in two different peoples very far from each other and of different cultures embracing this fish. In Spain it’s called Bacalao. I live near Philadelphia, and I see there is a Dominican/Latin American food market serving Bacalao. So this lowly fish has traveled far.

I sat by myself under the awning and I felt two things: It was October, like summer, lively with tourists at other tables and walking the sidewalks that I could people watch, thinking if my friends could see me now. October would be way too cold to sit outside. Would my friends be jealous? Would they even be wondering about me? I smiled to myself and whisper sang the song from the Broadway show Sweet Charity. I thought it was from Gypsy, but the internet verifies it for me. Love the snappy peppy lyrics. The other feeling is but I’m alone. All of these foreign trips. I was in my fifties and I had the means finally and I could still walk and nobody else that I knew had the time or the verve or the nerve for that matter, so it was now or never. I didn’t get around much. That is I didn’t “travel” in circles that liked to go far from home. I led a pretty boring and staid life. This was it. This was my chance. It didn’t occur to or interest the people I knew, and money was also a constant refrain: But that costs money! I would say to that, most of them didn’t have the money issues that I had and they had husbands, so they had built in travel partners, and their children were grown. I was divorced and alone. It was just an unheard of thing, this travel thing. It’s not exactly that they were insular, but when I think back, yes they were. I wondered all the time what the big world was like. I wondered what it would be like to learn Portuguese and Spanish survival phrases. I was also going to Spain on this trip. We are talking about two weeks. What were the risks? I was the ultimate preparer. Nothing would happen and basically nothing did happen. One glitch. the hotel in Lisbon where I arrived after the plane claimed they had no record of me or my tour. To my credit, I didn't panic. I took a nap--they let me stay. I had produced paperwork after all. In the evening my tour group showed up.

Portugal was first. I bought a little tape recorder and a tape with a book. Portuguese was hard. I found Spanish easier. They are not comparable languages. I lost the Portuguese book and tape! I later found it when we were in Spain at the bottom of my suitcase. Maybe that was an omen. An omen about challenge.

I was always fearful of aloneness and surprises, especially being in a country where I didn’t speak the language and yet I also liked it. Later in Spain I was able to use some of the phrases. It was fun. In case you’re wondering, I took French in school, so I fared much better in France.

The Bacalhau was amazing. The one I chose was a savory stew with roasted potatoes and vegetables. Yes, I could tell my friends about this!

We were not in Cascais that long. I remember little else about it. Lisbon and Belem and Sintra were the main highlights. Of course there was much more that we didn’t get to like the city of Porto or some of the islands or the southern coast.

What I liked about Portugal was its relative simplicity, the lesser famous sister of the Iberian Peninsula. A lot of history had happened in Portugal, important history, like explorers Magellan and Vasco De Gama, and Bartolomeu Dias, and a big sculpture built in the 1990s commemorates them on the shore of the Tagus River in Belem across the street from the cathedral where Vasco de Gama and other famous Portuguese are buried.

Portugal and particularly Lisbon today are considered a very hip choice for Americans who want to move to Europe. Lisbon is attractive, cultural and relatively inexpensive. Whether it’s a good choice is a hot potato question or a hot Bacalhau and potato question that I can’t answer, but maybe savoring the puff pastry egg custard tart from the Jeronimos Monastery in Belem might also entice.

Today I can hardly walk. My health is poor. I am embracing seniority. I am the ultimate armchair traveler. I cannot imagine having the wherewithal to step on an airplane, pack a heavy bag, stand in what seem like a mile long security line even in a wheelchair. I have done virtual live tours over the internet. I recently checked and even those tours have shut down, particularly the ones that I experienced of the Ukraine, but all the places. I am not sure that I will be welcomed and embraced in another country and that is a shame. I hope that is not true and yet I don’t want to find out. I’m glad I was at the right place at the right time in history. The future is a question mark and shifting like sands and continents, how different from what Magellan and De Gama and Columbus discovered.