![]() There are mixed grills, with chicken and pork escalopes, a little more chorizo and the stars of the show, expertly trimmed lamb chops. ![]() It is solid ingredients, treated with due care and attention. There is very little in the way of flummery coming out of that kitchen. Mains are variations on the same theme, which is what we’re here for. ‘Further opportunities for bread moppage’: pork and clams stew. We have a deep bowl of thumbnail-sized white clams, in a garlicky broth which demands to be finished off by the bread, and grilled prawns which have been split open and generously smothered with piri piri sauce. It lends hunks of the chorizo a welcome char and splits the skin so the juices run. ![]() Broad blue flames gutter and spin for a good few minutes at the end of the table. Thick lengths of taut-skinned chorizo arrive perched in custom-designed terracotta dishes with a well of booze at the bottom to be ignited. I remind the other elders at the table that it’s a snap for the fish paste of our youth. Rugged bread arrives with little foil-lidded pots of a salty sardine or mackerel pâté. I feel foolish for not having been here before. Cultivate patience.īut the food, when it arrives, is everything. While there are certainly enough waiters, there may not be quite enough people working the grill out back given a couple of lengthy waits. There’s a lot of opening out of stands at the side of each table for trays from the kitchen. The service has a sweet and solicitous air to it. Uniformed waiters work these tables, vigorously. Around us sits a mixed crowd – suited and booted men who I decide are spies from MI6, a younger set in serious puffas against the cold rippling off the Thames just over the road, a few families. So instead, here I am at last, on the outside terrace at Casa Madeira, beneath umbrellas equipped with heaters that cast a ripe orange glow and then cut out for a minute of gloom, before suddenly reilluminating. ‘Thick taut-skinned lengths arrive in custom-designed terracotta dishes’: chorizo. One of the owners died, the remaining owner sold up, the quality deteriorated and then a fire closed them altogether for a year or two. Back behind the takeaway was a hilarious, windowless restaurant, with a minstrel gallery and kitsch murals where they served ludicrously good value mixed grills, and dishes of clams and thumb-thick prawns. ![]() They did a small number of things very well. They did fabulous grilled ribs and chorizo, a denser, meatier version than its Spanish cousin. They did the best piri piri chicken, a spatchcocked wonder of smoky char and chilli and salt. I was once properly addicted to the food served at a grill house on Brixton Hill, originally called the Gallery. The fact is I love the most familiar bits of the Portuguese repertoire. Needing somewhere by which to mark a particular moment in my life, I book a table for six. They also have a bar a short distance away on South Lambeth Road, the heart of London’s Portuguese community, but this is the mothership. They converted the arches into a trio of businesses. ‘Split open and generously smothered’: grilled prawns and piri piri sauce. ![]()
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