Cataplana at Maria Catita in Lisbon, Portugal

We have recently found a lovely restaurant called Maria Catita on Rua Dos Bacalhoeiros by chance.

The restaurant looked nice from outside and it was already busy despite all other restaurants nearby were very quiet. It must have been a sign of good food, so we walked in and got a table right away. It has a very nice atmosphere inside too. We were lucky as others who came after us were all turned away...

Anyway,  all waiting staff were really nice, friendly and efficient. They brought us our English menu right away.

The menu looked interesting. I wanted to try octopus salad for starter so my husband and I decided to share this to try. For main course my husband ordered roasted tuna with sweet potato and I ordered cataplana, which is a traditional Portuguese dish that I have never tried before but always wanted to try. It says 'Speciality from the Algarve region cooked in a concave casserole Maria Catita style!  Well, if it has its restaurant's name attached to it, it must be good, right!?

In the meantime, my husband was selecting the wine and found vinho verde rose. We never had it as rose and were very intrigued about it. The waiter told us that it is a sour wine. .... interesting so we decided to try.

Well, it was sour alright, but not in the way of being off, it was more like a chewy sour if you know what I mean....  It was quite a nice wine, could get used to it.

The next thing, our octopus salad arrived.  Just as well we only ordered for one as the portion size was very generous. And this is really really nice. We were wondering what were in this - octopus of course, coriander of course (everythng in Portuguese dishes seem to have corianders in them...?), olive oil, red wine vinegar maybe and lemon?  Also lots of chopped crunchy red and green peppers which work very well in this dish.  We really loved this starter.

The next my cataplana has arrived ... first of all, the waiter brought a bowl of rice and put them into my plate.

Then a copper casserole dish (called cataplana) shaped like two clamshells containing lots of seafood in it appeared.  The waiter then celemoniously scooped all the seafood off the dish and coverd the rice at the bottom of my plate.

He explained that the dish acts like a pressure cooker and seals all goodness of ingredients within the container during the cooking process. Sounds great and it tasted really great too. There were muscle, prawns, monk fish, cod with some vegetables ... they were really well  married to create a wonderful fish stock poured over rice - such a clever dish....

My husband's roasted tuna with sweet potatoes also have arrived. Wow, you should see the size of tuna!  There were big chunks of tune, the size of man's fist each in a plant size pot with big chunks of sweet potatoes. This is a very meaty dish but not meat....   My husband really enjoyed this dish too.

.... look at the sizes of roasted tuna in comparison to my husband's hands ....

Anyway, these dishes went down very well with chewy-sourly vinho verde rose! We couldn't eat anything else after this so we just had uma bica each.

We ordered the bill, which came in a lovely tin....

The restaurant has a very lovely atmosphere, service was very friendly and efficient, food was lovely with generous portion, yet it only came to around 40 euro including wine and coffee.  We would definitely go back to this place.

The next day, we were walking on a different street looking for a place to eat dinner and found a cataplana casserole dish displayed on top of a sign outside of a restaurant, so I took a picture to remind me of what cataplana means ...

Anyway, we really enjoyed our dinner.  What shall we have for dinner tomorrow ....???

That's all forks!