Rua das Portas de Santo Antão is probably the most touristy food street in Lisbon. This pedestrian road is full of restaurants with guys outside hawking their specials and menus offering out-of-season sardines and frozen pizzas. But there’s more to this downtown thoroughfare than just luring American vacationers to overpriced mediocrity. Located on this road, buzzing even before the tourist boom thanks to its central location, musical theaters and local commerce, is one of the city’s timeless classics, O Churrasco. This restaurant looks different from the usual chicken restaurant, with impressionistic paintings hanging from its wooden walls and waiters in bow ties, and has been a camouflaged gem for many years, a particular favorite of middle-class families and theater lovers.

Lisbon’s communities from Portugal’s former colonies provide the strongest link to the country’s past, when it was the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west. Though integral elements of Lisbon life, these communities can sometimes be an invisible presence in their adopted land, pushed out to the periphery of the city. With our “Postcolonial Lisbon” series, CB hopes to bring these communities back into the center, looking at their cuisine, history and cultural life. In this third installment of the series, we look at Lisbon’s Mozambican community.

As the highway speeds out of Lisbon northward, the pastel apartment blocks of greater Lisbon’s northern sprawl give way to plots of farmland. It’s a road with no distinction, one not unlike countless others leaving cities elsewhere. Around 80 kilometers from Lisbon, the highway passes into the region of Oeste; although not readily apparent, Oeste is a place of great distinction. That becomes clearer a bit farther down the road, where on the side of a warehouse the words “Rocha Mundial” are printed beside the giant likeness of the region’s claim to fame, a green pear with light brown spots.