GOING OUT FOR DINNER?
Dinner at Penalva da Graca
WANT TO GO FOR A SWIM?
A busy day during the high season.
WE LOVE RIDING THE TRAM 28
Lisbon's popular Tram 28 is only 3 minutes from Tins Lisbon. Here is all you need to know.
Lisbon is the best place in the world for tinned fish?
We have Lisbon’s tinned food in our kitchen
We always have a little Lisbon conservas corner in our kitchen. The fish is delicious straight from the tin, it saves you when you need a quick snack, and it’s perfect as a last‑minute starter when friends suddenly turn up.
And then there’s the packaging.
All those colourful labels and retro graphics are so good that sometimes the tins end in our shopping bag just because they look great on the shelf.
So of course, I had to laugh when I stumbled upon Jeff Gordinier’s story in Esquire about how to make an easy, not‑boring lunch with that dusty can of tuna in your pantry.
In the piece, he writes about his fondness for conservas from the Iberian Peninsula and how he spent hours in Portuguese tinned‑fish shops back in 2017, staring at the beautiful packaging and even bringing home a sardine poster for the kitchen wall
How to Make an Easy, Not-Boring Lunch With That Can of Tuna in Your Pantry.
If you had suggested to me, at the beginning of the year, that there would be serious sales potential in a weird little book full of recipes involving canned tuna, herring, and mackerel, I would have laughed and directed you to the pile of forgotten cookbooks in my basement. But now it’s the middle of March, and a lot of us are stuck in our homes. ...Such is my fondness for conservas (as they’re known on the Iberian Peninsula) that when my wife and I traveled to Portugal in 2017, I spent hours in tinned-fish shops gazing in wonder at the beautifully packaged wares. We even have a poster of Portuguese sardines hanging in our kitchen.
Growing up on tinned fish
Our kitchen was microscopic – so we have to be creative and selective to get room for the things we need and things that are important to us. Like our collection of Tinned Fish together with my old favorite AIAIAI headset and an art memory by Sophus Ritto from his Limbo Kathmandu events in back in 2015.
Maybe that’s why Lisbon’s tinned delicacies feel so familiar.
I grew up in downtown Copenhagen and spent a lot of time as a kid in the city’s semi‑gastronomic outlets — our famous værtshuse — with my parents.
Most of them doubled as canteens.
Workers came for a couple of beers and their homemade lunch, and if they didn’t have food with them, they could usually order something simple and serious:
- Meatballs with pickled cucumber salad and rye bread – aka “Frikadeller med surt”
- Soft white bread with a few slices of cheese,
- Or sardines straight from an opened can, served with two slices of rye bread, a lemon quarter and “pimped” with a lonely sprig of parsley.
As teenagers, we more or less lived off festival sandwiches: 2 slices of bread plus a can of sardines, tuna or salmon mixed with cheap mayo. Fuel for countless rock festivals and late nights.
When I started playing chef for friends, deep‑fried breaded mussels from Limfjorden became my “house snack”, always followed by a big Salade Niçoise with unapologetically large chunks of tuna.
How we use tinned fish today
Today, our tinned fish game has only expanded.
We use tuna for one of our favourite Italian dishes, Vitello Tonnato, sardines on toasted bread with good olive oil, and anchovies for Andalusian‑style breakfast toasts.
On lazy days, we open a few different cans and eat the fish and seafood straight from the tin with a juicy tomato and some bread. It feels like cheating, but in the best possible way.
Tinned fish is probably Portugal’s most widely distributed product.
You can find Portuguese sardines, tuna and mackerel in supermarkets and little grocery shops all over the world.
Most people we know have a few cans hidden away in cupboards, drawers, fridges and other secret food corners… just in case something happens.
So if you can’t be here in Lisbon right now, you can still get a small taste of Portugal at home — just add good bread, a tomato and a cold drink.
Enjoy,
/Thomas
How the French brought cans to our Portuguese hood
The story of tinned food doesn’t start in Lisbon or Matosinhos, but in France. In the early 19th century, French confectioner Nicolas Appert developed one of the first methods to preserve food safely in sealed containers, a technique that eventually led to modern canning.
Fast‑forward a couple of centuries and canned fish has become a Portuguese icon.
Factories like Conservas Pinhais in Matosinhos still clean, brine and can sardines almost entirely by hand, proudly following a 100‑year‑old method that has turned these little tins into cult objects for food lovers.
What makes the story fun for us is that the French connection is literally part of our own hood. Just opposite Tings Lisbon here on the top of Lisbon’s highest hill, there is a small shop called POP Lisboa, or POP as we locals call it. Products of Portugal was started by our French friends Elliot and Sylvain.
POP is one of our favourite places to send guests who want to bring something edible and real back home. They collect high‑quality products from all over Portugal: wine, salt, charcuterie, olive oil, spirits and, of course, excellent tinned fish… you name it.
It’s not a theme‑park shop or an Instagram trap. POP is a neighbourhood place where us locals, young expats and visiting food nerds bump into each other while choosing tins and bottles, and where you actually want to stay and chat ‘n’ snack.
