Cristiano Ronaldo's Favourite Dish at O Tino Restaurant
Last week I wrote about a pastel de nata bought by a Hollywood A-lister. This week, I thought I’d tell you about a hole-in-the-wall family-run Portuguese restaurant in Camden, O Tino. On Saturday, I went there for dinner with my friends Jon and Josh.
Although I haven’t really spent any time in Portugal—except for a work getaway to the Algarve—to me, O Tino is understated in a way that feels traditional, as if it could equally exist in Mornington Crescent, Madeira, or any other place where all that matters is that the meat and fish are good.
While laid-back, if you pay attention, you can see the care that goes into the minutiae of the restaurant: the fold of the napkin, the chill of the beer, and the cut of the cucumber skin, only partially removed in alternating green and white strips, to retain some of its edge without being too crunchy. The menus, in Portuguese first and English second, are laminated. The walls are bare except for two mounted televisions that show the football; the larger screen showed the FC Porto game and the smaller one, a Saudi Pro League match which nobody watched.
The staff were warm and friendly, as always. It’s especially nice when they remember you and ask, “How are you, buddy? Haven’t seen you for a while.” It had been two years. Whether they actually remembered us or not was beside the point—we felt welcomed. With our first round of Sagres beers, we ordered a selection of savoury filled pastries. Cheery middle-aged guys at the table beside us drank fluorescent blue wine from coolers. It reminded us of a simpler time, when WKD was a drink that intuitively made sense; for a moment we too considered going blue, if only for a night.
The pastries were not so great, but it didn’t matter because I had ordered their bacalhau à Brás: a hearty dish of salted cod, onion, potatoes, and scrambled eggs. It’s creamy, well-rounded, and comforting. I’d say that its flavour profile sits somewhere between a Spanish omelette and Cullen skink. If I were making bacalhau at home, I’d bastardise it with green chillies and all the hot sauces. But I didn’t feel like being that guy. Black pepper would do. Bacalhau is one of those foods I discovered later in life than I would have liked. I wish it had been a weekend breakfast option growing up, lighter than a fry-up and more indulgent than Weetabix and a banana.
After first tasting bacalhau à Brás at O Tino in 2021, I went online to look up some recipes and found out that it’s Cristiano Ronaldo’s favourite dish, at least according to his mother, Dolores Aveiro (Saltbae might disagree). Tino, who the restaurant is named after, like Ronaldo, is from Madeira. I wondered how similar the bacalhau recipe at O Tino’s is to Ronnie’s mum’s. Might the abundant animal protein occasion peak male performance in me and Jon too (we were sharing)? I started to question if I liked this dish for its flavours, or whether the CR7 connection was having an effect on my judgement. But it made no sense to look up to Ronnie for his taste, especially since his idea of a good pizza is what appears to be a 3am kebab shop pizza with a 2.4 rating on Deliveroo. Proof that Ronaldo is no gastronome. Maybe mum Dolores doesn’t have the magic in her hands after all. It made perfect sense; she had been cooking with her feet.
