On April 27, 2016, the Diário de Notícias ran a headline that sounded like the plot of an action movie: “Mustafa. The Kurd who defended himself with a kebab knife.” This article isn’t about that legendary moment in Lisbon’s recent history, but it does start at the Palácio do Kebab, where the machete used by the restaurant owner to fend off the attackers is still displayed to this day—part museum piece, part defense mechanism.
This story, however, is about another immigrant, Sergio Zaciu, known on Instagram as @immigrantfoodie, which I avidly follow. Sergio has already posted over two hundred videos about restaurants in the Lisbon metropolitan area. The videos, roughly a minute long, are shot on his phone but are very well-produced—unsurprising given that Sergio studied filmmaking.
A quick introduction to the place, shots of the food and ambiance, Sergio’s voice narrating the experience in English, and a final rating on a scale of 1 to 10. Simple, effective, and highly tempting, Sergio’s short videos reveal a Lisbon that’s full of tascas and bistros, sidewalk cafés and bitoques, counters and tapas—a Lisbon that holds all the world’s flavors, and behind them, many stories.
It was curiosity that led me invite him for a chat. He kindly accepted and suggested the Palácio do Kebab. That’s where we met, over falafel and döner kebabs, to talk about this project, which already has over 23,000 followers.
I was surprised at first: contrary to what I thought, he wasn’t there for Mustafa’s story, but for the kebabs, which had been recommended to him by a fan of the page. Son of a Turkish mother, born in Germany, Sergio was still searching for a place in the city that did justice to this dish.
And it was while I was telling him this story that I realized I was being filmed, becoming part of one of his videos. That’s Sergio’s process: he enters with his phone in hand, capturing everything to later show the world what happened.
From Romania to LA to Lisbon
But let’s start at the beginning. Sergio grew up in Romania, his father’s homeland. He studied film in Los Angeles, California, and cinema is his passion: he writes critiques, screenplays, directs, and produces. The step from art to anthropology is often small, and it was his curiosity about people and the communities around him that led him to food.
In Los Angeles, Jonathan Gold remains, even six years after his death, a towering figure in food criticism—the first to win a Pulitzer for the craft. Gold mapped LA through its restaurants, from Little Ethiopia to Koreatown, from Little Armenia to Thai Town, introducing the city to its diverse communities and ethnic enclaves through food. It was Gold’s influence that led Sergio to discover LA, and today it’s through Sergio that many arriving in Lisbon can travel from Malveira to Baixa-Chiado in a feast of exotic and local flavors.
That’s the goal of his project: to introduce Lisbon through its food. It began as a way to suggest restaurants to friends visiting him, but quickly took on a life of its own. He was looking for what he had lost by leaving LA: people from all over the world, culture around every corner, and art in its many forms. Lisbon had stayed in his memory as a place that could feel like home because it smelled like the world.
His second post, for example, is about the Italian ice cream shop Niva, one of my personal favorites, with locations in Príncipe Real and Alcântara, and a story of survival during COVID-19 that deserves to be told someday. His fourth, shortly after, spotlights Frangaria Zé da Mouraria. The variety is dizzying: ramen one day, pataniscas the next.
In a mosaic of Instagram posts, we discover the whole world in one city. Japan, China, Korea, India, Nepal, Mexico, Italy, the United States, Greece, Iran, France, Germany, Goa, Vietnam, Thailand, Spain, Syria, Peru, Turkey, Lebanon, Indonesia, Mozambique, Brazil, and of course, lots and lots of Portugal.
The page grew, and so did its impact. After his video on the incredible American barbecue project by Rui Matias, Kau Barbecue in Malveira, went viral, Sergio received a message from the owner: “The video changed everything; we had to close three hours early because we sold out all the meat. Thank you!”
Helping small businesses
That’s when he realized that his @immigrantfoodie hobby could actively help small businesses find their audience. His passion project was taking on a serious purpose. While he continues to visit more well-known restaurants—because, honestly, he goes everywhere—Sergio became more interested in the “hole-in-the-wall places no one knows about but should.” It might sound strange, but a viral video can change the fate of a small family business—and Sergio embraced that possibility as a mission.
When I asked him why he doesn’t post negative reviews, he was clear:
“I don’t want to post negative reviews. When I review a movie, I can be harsh, I hold movies to a very high standard. A film is a work of art. When you create art, you can’t expect its value to go unquestioned. If you’re making art without that ambition, you’re doing it like an idiot. When you open a restaurant, you’re not doing it for people to write reviews. It’s people’s livelihoods. The @immigrantfoodie is a guide to where people should eat, not where they shouldn’t.”
This perspective, he says, might change if a restaurant’s ambition is to make its culinary offering an art form. “If you’re a Michelin-starred restaurant aiming to create art from your cooking, that’s a different story. But if I go to a small place for kebabs and the kebabs aren’t good, I just wish them the best and hope they survive.” For the record, to avoid any doubt: Mustafa’s kebabs got the thumbs up.
His mission is clear: to find great food and use the page’s impact to help hardworking people with great service succeed.
Immigration, what else
At one point the conversation veered from food to immigration. Sergio believes there’s a lack of serious integration policies: “My father, who migrated from Romania to Germany, had to learn the language and eventually got a job at a German company with German colleagues. If European governments were promoting immigration out of genuine charity to refugees, we’d also be invested in integrating them into our society. Unfortunately, we only use them for cheap labor: We want an Uber driver, a domestic worker, a waiter. We keep them in their communities, living apart from us.”
He continued: “What I try to do with ImmigrantFoodie is at least spotlight the different small business owners, whether they’re Chinese, Indian, Palestinian or otherwise, to remind us of how important it is to invite each other into the other person’s world. I have sympathy for a Portuguese local who is upset that their favorite tasca is shutting down and being replaced by a kebab shop, but if we’d all work harder to integrate foreigners into our society, then maybe they’d also swing by the local businesses instead of building their own. After all, a country like Portugal needs foreigners to survive. When you talk to restaurant owners, Portuguese or international, you realize that foreigners make up not only a large part of their workforce, but also a significant portion of their clientele.”
I asked if he ever plans to use his newfound influence as a food critic to address these issues. Sergio responded with little doubt: “No, that’s not the page’s purpose. I save those interventions for my work as a filmmaker.
My political message with @immigrantfoodie, if there is one, is just this: support small businesses.”
Sergio, often accompanied by his brother Oliver, also a film lover and the other half of the project The Zaciu Brothers, was recently interviewed by our partners at People of Lisbon. When I spoke to him, he still had a long list of restaurants to visit “to get a more complete picture of the city.”
In the meantime, and after many requests, he launched a Google map of the city with all his suggestions, which can be subscribed to via his Instagram page, constantly updated with the latest places he’s visited.
One question I didn’t get to ask: when will the Lisbon version of @immigrantfoodie’s Jonathan Gold-style list of the city’s 101 best restaurants come out? That list, which was really a map, guided locals and visitors alike through L.A. for years on a culinary journey around the world. Lisbon, though smaller and less populated, also contains the world within its kitchens, in the curves of its neighborhoods, in its many holes in the wall — a world Mensagem reveals every day on its pages.
Who knows, maybe one day, paths will cross again for another great love.
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: