There’s only one place in Lisbon where you’ll enjoy – seriously – a menu completely cooked in flames, at chef Alexandre Silva’s Fogo restaurant, which has just joined TheFork gastronomic discount platform, in this case with 30%.
The promotion is available every day, with dinners during the week and lunches and dinners at the weekend, and this discount only applies to food, excluding drinks, cafeteria and tasting menu, with a maximum of three people per table at lunch and four at dinner, and is only available until February 7th.
Everything you taste here is cooked over a fire. This is the traditional technique that renowned Chef Alexandre Silva chose to use to work with his products, which are always national and which, on the plate, reveal themselves to be true inspirations of our roots.
No wonder it’s so difficult to get a table in one of chef Alexandre Silva’s most renowned restaurants and, why not, in the whole country.
Well, now it’s our turn to try it out.
The restaurant
The Fogo restaurant is located on Avenida Elias Garcia 57A, very close to Campo Pequeno.
The entrance from the street is incredible! A huge charcoal-colored wall welcomes you, making you wonder what’s behind that black wall.
Of course we’ve seen photos of the restaurant, but we assure you, in person it’s simply brutal.
As soon as you walk through the huge glass and steel door, you’ll find a small waiting area and an incredible bar, where master João Bruno prepares some of the most creative cocktails we’ve ever tasted , combining bar and kitchen techniques to create drinks with incandescent aromas.
Opposite the bar is the kitchen, if you can really call it a kitchen. But this is by no means just any kitchen.
You won’t see any stoves or gas burners here. In the Fogo restaurant, everything is prepared and cooked over hot coals.
The heat from the glowing stones can be felt throughout the room, as can the characteristic smells of roasting something on a stove.
But the truth is that the feeling of being here is quite pleasant: you don’t feel hot and the smell, incredible as it may seem, doesn’t get on your clothes.
Finally, the ceiling of the Fogo restaurant. It’s fantastic! The lamps are a kind of bar, reminiscent of pieces of burning wood, providing a very pleasant yellowish light for those who choose this space for lunch or dinner.
Secret Lisbon Experience
We sat at a table right by the counter (where you can also sit), to enjoy the dynamics of the kitchen and Chef Alexandre Silva, who calmly guides everything that comes out of the embers.
The atmosphere, light and very peaceful, is no different from an ordinary restaurant, but what we saw coming out of that kitchen to our table was something extraordinary.
We love to eat. So satisfying our appetites wasn’t going to be a very complicated task for this chef.
And what we tasted over the next two hours was something transcendent. It lit up our souls.
On the menu
The starters
On the menu at the Fogo restaurant you’ll find a never-ending menu of starters, all of which are waiting for our next visits.
From Oysters on the Grill to Crab with Garlic Butter, a mix of appetizers with butter, olive oil, homemade pickles and pork rillette accompanied by sourdough bread baked in a wood-fired oven arrived at our table .
But we didn’t stop there when it came to starters! As appetizing as the oysters and crab cakes were, the chef chose to treat us to a Beef Tartare with Smoked Yolk and Cottage Cheese, with White Shrimp from the Algarve on the Grill and a dose – simply divine – of the banal but incredible Cockles , which also had an unmistakable taste of the grill.
What did we like best? It’s impossible to say. The mixture of land and sea flavors entered our mouths and lingered there for brief moments that words cannot describe.
Main course… or courses
We didn’t even know what was in store for us and, without much delay, a generous slice of Grilled Brill with Butter and Garlic Sauce appeared … artistically divine! We wanted more!
We moved on to the meat, where we were presented with chef Alexandre Silva’s famous Oven Rice.
We’d heard of it, but never thought it would be so delicious to taste… to “shave” the pan until there wasn’t a grain of rice left.
The sweets, the desserts
There are three delicious desserts to try at the Fogo restaurant: Lemon and Tangerine Tart, Mil Folhas and Coffee and Hazelnut Semifreddo.
The chef chose the second on the list, the Mil Folhas, the jewel of the house, the trump card, the sacred recipe… we put our hands to our heads!
The delicacy of this sweet, with several layers of different flavors and aromas, left us completely surrendered to the patisserie engineering.
The cocktails
They were the first to arrive at the table and accompanied us throughout this experience, which took just over two hours.
On the right is the “Das Cinzas”, ingeniously created to slowly intoxicate even the most demanding cocktail critic.
On the left, sweet and with a hint of pineapple, is a cocktail that you can taste even through its spring-loaded shell, as you sip its fresh, smooth elixir.
This is how our tasting ended, in a restaurant that will forever be remembered as one of the most incredible gastronomic experiences we’ve ever had.
For this, we would like to thank chef Alexandre Silva and all the staff, who welcomed us with open arms and unfailing friendliness.
One last tip if you decide to go there: go with plenty of time and a great desire to eat, and take the opportunity to try as much as you can because you never know when you’ll be able to get a table there again.
Please note that at the time of our experience, March 2022, this was the menu in force, so some dishes may have changed since then.