It all started as a small food blog in 2009, launched by Ansel Mullins and Yigal Schleifer in Istanbul called ‘Istanbul Eats’. Ansel Mullins is from Chicago, moved to Istanbul in 2002 and has lived in Lisbon since 2016, where he took the blog much far. “Food was a great way to write about culture, history, all fascinating stories that we were encountering in Istanbul. The goal of the blog was originally to tell the untold culinary stories of the city, and that never changed.”
From the beginning, the focus of the project has been to support the traditional, local restaurants in Istanbul. Ansel mentions: “Me and my partner wanted to share the stories of fantastic restaurants that are small and unknown, where it’s just a husband and wife making the food from their village. That taught us so much about the city. We wanted to tell those stories and we started a blog for this purpose.”
Ansel Mullins describes how this developed into a bigger initiative. The readers of the blog started to ask if they could bring them to the places they wrote about on their blog. This way, Ansel Mullins and his partner naturally started to provide not only the articles but also the experience. And this is how the official food tours arose. He says: “We could give people the most unexpected day of their trip to Istanbul. And at the same time, we could celebrate the stories that we think are great. It was another way of sharing those stories.”
In 2010, Istanbul Eats became Culinary Backstreets and expanded to different cities around the world. Currently, it is active in 17 cities: Athens, Barcelona, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Marseille, Mexico City, Naples, New Orleans, Oaxaca, Palermo, Porto, Queens, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Tbilisi, Tokyo… and Lisbon.
Ansel started the initiative in Lisbon when he came here in 2016. He came in touch with the local journalist, Celia Pedroso, and they started to work together in Lisbon. Celia Pedroso is nowadays the head of the operation in Portugal.
“The moment we started in Lisbon, the interest in visiting Lisbon was coming up. So we saw an opportunity to capture people’s interest with the kind of storytelling we tell. We did not expect it to grow the way it did. We hope to have a positive impact with our tours; taking people off the beaten path”, Ansel says.
A journey around the world through Lisbon
Fox Coffee is an atmospheric restaurant, decorated with colourful accessories and pillows, on the walls are hanging classical African masks. At the same time, the open space, the plants inside and the visible kitchen give away a modern vibe. The restaurant is owned by Tony, known as the Chachupa King. Chachupa is a Cape Vardean bean stove; the speciality of Fox Coffee.
Fox Coffee is a stop during the ‘Post-Colonial Feast’ food tour, one of the food tours provided by Culinary Backstreets Lisbon.
We sat down to taste two of the Chachupas made by Tony and his fellow cooks. In the meantime, the tour guide, Kika Menano, told us the story of the Chapchupa King. Tony’s family is from Cape Verde but he was born in Lisbon soon after the end of the dictatorship and the independence of the former Portuguese colony ‘Cape Verde’, an island group in the Atlantic Ocean on the West Coast of Africa. Tony took over a small coffee place in 2017 and added, as advised by a friend, Chachupa to the menu. He brought aunts, cousins, and his father over from Africa to help him cook the dinners and teach him how to prepare the perfect Chachupa.
This is one of the stories told during the ‘Post-Colonial Feast’ food tour. The tour starts in Arroios, a neighbourhood where many cultures come together. In one day we travelled from Brazil to Cape Verde, to Mozambique, Angola and Goa (India).
When we stopped at the traditional Goan Restaurant Sabores de Goa, we got an extensive explanation of the the age of discovery (the 15th century) and how Portugal colonised Goa, a small region on the southwestern coast of India.
After the independence of Goa in 1961, many intellectual people from Goa came to Portugal because the Portuguese government offered Portuguese citizenship. They brought their culinary specialities with them and many of the dishes in Sabores de Goa are a result of the fusion between Indian and Portuguese cuisine. We tasted Indian-Portuguese specialities such as Sana, a spongy dumpling with coconut, Vindaloo, a meat curry with wine and garlic, and Bebinca, a Goan layer cake.
Culinary Backstreets sees an opportunity in food places outside of the beaten path. They always want to go deeper with their stories. Lisbon has many traditional restaurants and has an entire local industry aside from the famous tourist restaurants. Culinary Backstreets Lisbon is constantly looking for these kinds of places. As Ansel Mullins describes: “We want to go beyond the famous Pastel de Nata.”
He also describes how this became more and more of a challenge. The rise of the mass tourism sector and gentrification in the city, challenges them to find the backstreets in the city. The tour guide, Kika Menano, talks about this during the tour. She tells us how there are places that they used to visit with tours, that became more and more popular as tourist spots. These places are not part of the food tours anymore. “We want to keep on delving into the more hidden place, that is the charm of the Culinary Backstreets and we can’t lose that”, she says.
How many stories can the food places of Lisbon tell?
The food tour was a versatile experience; we visited supermarkets, markets, restaurants and cafés. The enthusiasm and passion of Kika Menano was contagious. She told the group about the history, discoveries, culture, architecture and relation to food. In every place, she visibly had a connection with the owner and waitresses, chatting about how the day was going so far.
As a customer, it gives you the feeling of coming very close. It is more than visiting the restaurants; it is a journey through unique food places in Lisbon.
Culinary Backstreets provides three other food tours in Lisbon next to the “Post-Colonial Feast”. The tour “Song of the Sea” is focused on fish, seafood and tradition in Lisbon’s Port Zone, taking place at the riverfront. The tour “Hidden Flavors of the Hillside” takes place in the traditional neighbourhoods of Mouraria and Graça, which have many historic and scenic backstreets. “Lisbon Awakens” is mainly focused on the Portuguese Age of Discovery and how the food in the city changed because of international influences.
Ansel Mullins describes how the tours are organised and how stops on the tour are selected: “We research the background of the cuisine it represents. When we find a small restaurant and its owner, we want to find out: What’s his story? When did he or she come here? What’s his position in this community? How does he represent the cuisine of Portugal or Lisbon? What are the dishes that are special to the people in this kitchen? What story does it tell? What dishes are truly excellent to taste? To make it a stop on the tour, it needs to check a lot of boxes.”
Ansel continues: “Imagine people come to Lisbon for three or four days, and one of those days is on our food tour. We want to make every single bite on the tour really special and worth it. Each of the bites has to be an opportunity to tell great stories, to delight people’s stomachs, and to make Lisbon proud.”
Culinary Backstreets Lisbon publishes articles on the stories behind Portuguese food and restaurants on their website. Ansel Mullins mentions the website and social media are essential next to the food tours. It focuses more on the local audience and bringing the locals to the restaurants.
The locals are very important since these are the people who may come to the local restaurants regularly, while tourists would only join a tour once or twice in their lives. The online articles and posts are about the same kind of places as the ones shown on the food tour, but not necessarily the same ones.
Austin Bush is a writer for Culinary Backstreets Lisbon and the owner of the Instagram account.
He is originally from Oregon but lived in Bangkok (Thailand) for 23 years. He is a freelance writer and photographer focused on travelling and food. When he came to Lisbon in 2022, he came into contact with Culinary Backstreets Lisbon and started writing articles for them.
I met Austin Bush in a local Tasca in the middle of Lisbon, one of his favourite traditional Portuguese restaurants. It is a small, traditional-looking place, the walls are covered with coloured traditional Portuguese tiles. An old man is standing behind the bar, passionately serving his guest with Portuguese specialities. We sit down at one of the tables. The man immediately comes to help us, prising one of his pasties.
Austin Bush likes to come to these kinds of places, “It shows so much of the culture of a country”, he says. This is why he likes his work so much. He says, “I love writing about food. It’s a way to get to know things about the culture. And it is a way to practice language because people love talking about food. It’s one way of accessing very tangible culture. You can touch it. You can smell it. You can feel it.”
Austin Buch keeps on exploring and discovering new places and dishes: “This quest is endless, there is so much to discover, so many great stories to be told. For Instagram, I made a bunch of posts about coffee, for example. The ways that people drink coffee. And I made posts about Marisqueiras (red.: traditional Portuguese fish restaurants) and about Tasca’s. There’s always something you can explore”, he concludes.
An unique passion for food
The people working for Culinary Backstreets Lisbon have a passion for food and particularly carry out their love for Portuguese cuisine. Kika Menano proudly calls Portuguese food “the best food of the entire world”, during the tour.
Austin Buch has a lot of experience with different cuisines around the world but appreciates Portuguese cuisine for its simplicity. He lived in Thailand for a long time and makes the comparison: “When you have a seafood dish in Thailand, you add a lot of chillies, you add a lot of things to it. Whereas here, it is just fish with salt and olive oil, and it’s delicious.”
“Another interesting thing about the food in Portugal is eating seasonally.”, says Austin Bush, “In Thailand, the dishes don’t change so much around the year, but here they do. For example, I haven’t eaten a tomato in maybe a couple of months because I want to wait until the summer when the tomatoes are good in quality. And we’re coming into spring now; I’m so excited to eat asparagus or peas, I love it.”
Ansel Mullins emphasises the connection of Portuguese cuisine with the former colonies. He says, “Lisbon, as a former capital of a colonial empire, remains so connected to these places. You can feel this in the gastronomy and culture. Whereas if you’re in Madrid, you don’t have any sense of Venezuela or Mexico, here it is influenced by the old colonies. It’s still very fresh. As a writer and someone who’s focused on food and culture, that’s fascinating. I like that. I think that Lisbon is very unique in that sense.”
In 2023, Culinary Backstreets Lisbon published a book, a city guide that takes you through unique local restaurants in Lisbon. People who join the tour receive the book, but it is mainly written for the locals, to make them regular visitors of the restaurants. This is one of the ways Culinary Backstreets Lisbon keeps on developing. In a time of mass tourism and gentrification, this is more important than ever.
The people working for Culinary Backstreets Lisbon will continue looking for new places and dishes, to tell new stories. And hope they will never lose sight of their main message: support your local Tasca.
O jornalismo que a Mensagem de Lisboa faz une comunidades,
conta histórias que ninguém conta e muda vidas.
Dantes pagava-se com publicidade,
mas isso agora é terreno das grandes plataformas.
Se gosta do que fazemos e acha que é importante,
se quer fazer parte desta comunidade cada vez maior,
apoie-nos com a sua contribuição: