by Gizane Campos for Luxeat Guide

It’s June in Portugal, and the country is awash with the Santos festival, the street parties honouring the Catholic saints Anthony, Peter, and John. Amid the colourful decorations and the pulse of traditional music, stalls sell all manner of funfair foods. But one unassuming guest of honour commands the open fire. Somewhere between the smoke of a charcoal grill and the first bite of a perfectly cooked sardine, something almost involuntary happens. Saliva gathers, then a savoury, rich, meaty flavour fills you.

This is umami, the fifth taste. A loan word from Japanese meaning “pleasant savoury taste,” the name may be imported, but the experience is not. It is a lived, visceral sensation deeply embedded in Portuguese food culture long before the word existed here.

Japan not only named it but codified umami through dashi, kombu and fermentation. The Nordic cuisines have turned it into a laboratory of controlled decay. But Portugal arrived at it differently, through necessity, preservation, salt, time…and the Atlantic. So we went on a journey to discover the Portuguese umami flavours, and whether Portugal has ever fully named what it has always known.

And at the centre of our quest sits our unassuming protagonist: the sardine.

The Fifth Element

Tucked into the middle of the historic Bairro Alto, in Lisbon, Ofício restaurant stands out without pretension. Maurício Varela’s path to this kitchen is anything but linear. Born in Aveiro, he spent thirteen formative years in São Paulo, where he took his first steps inside a kitchen while studying Social and Political Sciences. He cooked at D.O.M. under Alex Atala, then at Javier Aranda’s Michelin-starred Gaytán in Madrid, before moving to Lisbon, where he worked in a series of kitchens. 

Ofício is his most complete statement yet: traditional Portuguese cuisine executed with an avant-garde, guided by seasonality and close relationships with producers. He runs his kitchen here with what he calls freedom, serving food he believes in without chasing stars. The result is a restaurant that feels focused on its main priority, product first.

The meal makes the argument plain. A horse mackerel tartare arrives in a shiso leaf, an opener that is at once an explosion of umami and something surprisingly fresh. The fish’s iodine intensity is lifted by the leaf’s herbal sharpness, the whole thing gone in a single bite. Later, an Alentejo chickpea stew with Iberian pork presa: slow, deep, the legumes having absorbed the fat and smoke of the meat into something that coats the mouth and lingers. This is the Portuguese umami that Varela talks about, the flavour built over time and by good instinct rather than by technique for its own sake.

“Umami is naturally present in everything,” Varela tells me over the course of a meal that quietly proves his point. “A chanfana, a feijoada, a bacalhau à Brás, all of that is full of glutamates. It’s what makes you say: ‘This is really good.’”

Long before the term arrived from Japan, Portuguese kitchens were already building flavour through slow cooking, salting, curing and time. The original objective was not complexity but survival. As Mark Kurlansky writes in Salt: A World History, salt was not simply a seasoning but one of the forces that shaped trade, cities and entire empires. Its ability to preserve food makes long-distance travel and maritime expansion possible.

For centuries, salt was one of Portugal’s most powerful resources. It preserved fish for long voyages, cured meat for winter, and allowed a small nation to operate across oceans. Bacalhau, or salted cod, became a national identity built on a fish that doesn’t even live in Portuguese waters. The paradox is very Portuguese: to transform something foreign into something entirely your own through patience and technique.

Oh Salty Sea

“…how much of your salt comes from the tears of Portugal.”   Fernando Pessoa

The drive south to the Algarve feels like a lesson in the geography of flavour. By the time you reach Portimão, the Atlantic is your companion and backdrop. Chef João Oliveira understands this better than most. His Michelin-starred Vista Restaurant sits inside the historic Bela Vista Hotel, a graceful early-twentieth-century manor perched above Praia da Rocha, its terraces facing the open sea. Diners here quickly learn that Portuguese cuisine begins in the ocean.

Oliveira arrived here in 2015 at 27, after a decade working under a chef who, as he puts it with diplomatic understatement, “didn’t accept other people’s opinions.” The creative constraint became the making of him. At Vista, he started from scratch, no inherited team, no inherited menu, and spent his first year getting lost before finding his direction. The kitchen’s identity emerged from difficulty: two stress ulcers from overwork forced him to cut gluten and lactose, which gradually reshaped the entire menu philosophy. He cut meat in 2017. What remained was the sea, the land immediately around him, and a commitment to revealing these flavours.

“We have a natural flavour enhancer,” Oliveira explains. “Fish from the sea is already slightly salty. Add smoke, add iodine, and you have umami, naturally.” Portugal, he suggests, does not need to build depth from scratch because it begins with it. “The role of the cook is not to reinvent but to reveal.”

Sitting on the terrace as the Atlantic light fades over Praia da Rocha, I see his philosophy arriving on the plate. Almadrava tuna, caught using the ancient trap-fishing tradition of the Algarve, arrives with mussels and seaweed, each element already carrying that natural salinity he describes. Then, come the scarlet prawns from Vila Real de Santo António, paired with Mediterranean strawflower and lemon. It is a dish so precise in its balance of iodine, sweetness and acid that the word umami feels almost reductive.

Later, bass grouper with razor clams and leeks. A visit to the kitchen afterwards confirms what the plates already suggest, this is a cook who builds flavour by removing everything unnecessary.

In the same town of Portimão, a visit to the Portimão Museum, also known as the Sardines Museum, brings this into historical relief. Housed in a former cannery factory, where the grandparents of many current residents once earned their living, the museum traces five millennia of interaction between people and the sea along this coastline. The sardine canning industry that powered the Algarve’s economy for much of the twentieth century is documented here in industrial detail: the rows of women at workbenches and their babies’ nursery rooms, the pressing machines and the tins stacked floor to ceiling. This visit was crucial to understanding the economic value of our little hero fish.

Don’t quote me, the data bears it out. As of 2024, the sardine reclaimed its position as the country’s primary maritime resource by weight, according to the Institute of National Statistics (INE). Sardines are second only to octopus in economic value. The irony? Octopus is a seafood that most of the world does not associate with Portugal.

Back in Lisbon, recently opened Lamina (the word ‘animal’ spelt backwards) is the newest restaurant from chef Vasco Coelho Santos. Built on a “nose-to-tail” philosophy, the primary focus is the full utilisation of the animal and the use of fire as a central cooking technique. Also behind the Michelin-starred Euskalduna in Porto, the chef frames Portuguese umami in direct terms. Vasco is a vivacious company, someone who thinks quickly and speaks the same way. Luxeat readers may remember him from our 2022 Japan Meets Portugal project, in which he explored the deep structural parallels between Japanese and Portuguese food philosophy. He has been thinking about umami for some time. “It’s less laboratory and more built through tradition, patience and the need to preserve,” he says. “That distinction is everything.”

The Sardine Question

Could a sardine ever be the new caviar? It is the kind of question that sounds provocative until you sit with it. At Vista, João Oliveira has been sitting with it for years. He ferments sardines into garum, cures and crisps their roe, and stretches their flavour across multiple textures. It is the same respectful attention a Japanese chef might bring to a single piece of fish.

Last summer’s sardine dish used every part of the fish: the fillet marinated then grilled, the heads rendered into garum for a sharp, oxidative finish; and the roe briefly cured in brine, lightly cooked, and served with a crisp exterior concealing a creamy, lightly salted interior. The base was corn prepared four ways — grilled, fried, roasted, puréed. “We use everything from the sardine,” he says simply.

Still, he is clear about where the comparison ends: “I would always prefer a good grilled sardine to a spoon of caviar.” Because in Portugal, luxury is proximity, in this case an intimacy to the sea, to the season or the moment.

Maurício Varela at Ofício is equally resistant to the reframing. “I don’t think sardines should be treated like caviar,” he says. “There is no better way to serve them than on toasted bread with olive oil and garlic.”

The most unexpected answer comes from Marlene Vieira. Hers shifts the question entirely. It is not the sardine, she argues, but the sardine’s roe that deserves the comparison. “The roe, cured, delivers an umami that is unbelievable,” she says. “In flavour, it surpasses caviar. The only thing missing is the texture — that crunch, that pop.” She pauses, then makes a different suggestion altogether: “Perhaps the sardine is not the new caviar. Perhaps it is the new truffle.”

The comparison is worth taking seriously. Like truffles, the sardine is seasonal, available from June to October, nothing more. Like truffles, its quality varies profoundly by geography. “The best sardines in Portugal come from the Algarve. The small, round, extraordinary ones from the waters between Morocco and Portugal, where Atlantic currents create a marine flora unlike anywhere else,” insists Vieira. “There is even a saying in Portugal,” she adds, “the sardine wants to be small.”

I am at Marlene, her Michelin-starred restaurant overlooking the river Tagus. The view alone tells you something about Portugal’s relationship with water. Her signature dish pairs sardines with foie de mer, or seafood foie gras. It is monkfish liver, which she considers one of Portugal’s most undervalued products. “When you eat it together, it is as if you are swimming in the sea,” she says. The sardine roe she uses as a finishing element, like truffle, grated over pasta, stirred through rice.

The great argument here is that scarcity, in gastronomy, has a way of rewriting narratives. “Sardines have become almost a noble product now,” Oliveira observes. “Not because of what they are, but because they’re no longer always there.” Overfishing, climate shifts and market pressure have reshaped their availability. “The sardine was once simply there; now it’s something you have to anticipate, something you have to plan for.”

Oliveira watched this shift in real time. Last season, premium Algarve sardines (the small, round type) reached €22 to €24 per kilo at auction. A single sardine at a Santos festival stall now costs €5. “It has become a luxury product through scarcity,” he says, “more than through the nature of the fish itself.” He is direct about the cause: the first day of the fishing season, and he describes it with barely suppressed frustration. “Boats racing to land tonnage in days rather than spacing the quota across the season, crashing their own prices in the process.”

Technique Without Obsession

For Vasco Coelho Santos, umami results from working with the produce. His two restaurants embody two registers of the same philosophy: Euskalduna in Porto, with a very ambitious tasting menu that pushes tradition against contemporary, and Lamina in Lisbon, where that same rigour meets greater accessibility. In both, the approach to flavour is identical: start with the product, then unlock it.

“The product is always the base,” he says. “But technique unlocks it, curing, fermentation, reduction.” Rather than transforming ingredients, these techniques concentrate them. Reduction in particular will remove water, leaving behind the essence. “Reduction of a stock, a sauce, the natural juices of a vegetable, remains one of the most effective ways to build flavour, without needing many elements,” he adds. Fire does similar work: the grill introduces complexity without multiplication.

His thinking extends beyond the obvious cuts, which are more than ever present in Lamina’s concept. “There is a lot of flavour outside the noble parts,” he says. Bones, skin, fat, offal, these are not secondary elements but carriers of depth. It is a philosophy with ancient roots in Portuguese cooking, where nothing was wasted because nothing could be. I reflect on this thought while savouring the oxtail wet rice at Lamina. Umami is flavour and ethics: using everything, wasting nothing and extracting fully.

Asked which single dish might best summarise Portugal’s flavour to someone who has never tasted it, Santos answers without hesitation: a creamy rice made with an intense fish stock, finished with bivalves and seaweed, a touch of cured sausage, and fresh herbs. “It has coast, countryside, tradition, comfort and intensity,” he says. “Everything that Portugal also is.”

He also singles out an unexpected umami carrier: the onion. Slowly caramelised or roasted until it collapses into sweetness, it delivers extraordinary depth. “Portuguese tomato at peak season, the country’s coastal seaweed, octopus, well-fermented bread, these are the ingredients that surprise people most when they realise what they contain,” adds Vasco Coelho Santos.

Marlene Vieira, meanwhile, brings a more contemporary restlessness to the same ingredients. She changes her menus at Marlene and Zunzum Gastrobar, with unusual frequency, driven by a desire to keep discovering what works. “I don’t stay fixed to what was done before,” she says. “I take these things and mix them and keep finding new ways to place umami in other combinations.” Her favoured umami ingredients read like her personal map of Portugal: sardine and sardine roe, the coração de boi tomato from the Douro, monkfish liver, sea urchin, and chouriço pulled through a refogado.

The Value Problem

If Portugal is so rich in umami, why hasn’t it fully claimed it? This is the question that brings me to Marlene, the restaurant and the chef. The space is a light-filled, glass-encased room on the banks of the Tagus, from which you see the river, wide and luminous, outside the windows. Marlene Vieira herself matches the energy of the room: direct, quick, brimming with conviction. She is one of Portugal’s most prominent and visible chefs, and she has spent years thinking about why the country undersells itself.

“There is a lack of ambition,” she says plainly. “People don’t always realise what they have.” What follows is a diagnosis that goes far beyond gastronomy. Portuguese olive oil is routinely sold in bulk to Italian producers, who bottle and market it under their own labels. Wild mushrooms harvested in Portugal are purchased wholesale by Spanish intermediaries. Azorean tuna, among the best on earth, goes almost entirely to Japan, while the islanders who catch it rarely eat it themselves.

“We tend to value what comes from outside more,” Vieira says. The result is a contradiction: Portugal is a country of exceptional raw materials with little self-promotion. She points to the Basque Country as a counterexample, a region where gastronomy has become a community economy, in which producers, chefs and restaurateurs sustain one another deliberately, preventing outside acquisition by working collectively. “They are united,” she says. “We are not.”

There is something almost melancholic in the way she describes it: a nation that crossed every ocean, mapped unknown coastlines, built a global empire from the edge of Europe and then, once the achievement was done, seemed to lose interest in its own story. “The Portuguese are incredibly creative,” she insists. “The most creative people I know. But creativity without ambition doesn’t travel.”

But something is moving. A generation of chefs is working in genuine partnership with producers, journalists and institutions. The light, as she puts it, has been switched on. “Portugal is now a point on the gastronomic map,” she says. “It wasn’t always. Now there is work to do.”

Portugal and Japan

The comparison with Japan is inevitable, and more historically textured than it first appears. Marlene Vieira raises it herself with characteristic confidence: she believes that Japanese preservation techniques have Portuguese origins. The ships that reached Japan in the sixteenth century carried provisions: salted fish, preserved meats, and techniques of extending the life of food across long ocean voyages. “I have no doubt,” she says, “that umami existed in Portugal long before anyone here used that word.”

Both cultures are maritime, heavily reliant on fish. Japan and Portugal also understand, in their bones (pun intended), that preservation creates flavour. A Japanese dish balances its flavour elements by design; a Portuguese dish often arrives at the same balance through habit, repetition and inherited knowledge.

Focusing only on sardines would miss the wider picture. Portuguese umami runs through bacalhau, through chouriço and other smoked meats, through slow stews and caramelised onions, fermented bread, vinegars and wines. It is layered, regional and deeply tied to the landscape. A dish that embodies Portugal’s umami? “The cabidela,” says Marlene Vieira. A traditional dish of chicken or rabbit cooked in its own blood, which Vieira names as the single dish most clearly expressing the Portuguese umami. “Cabidela achieves in two or three ingredients what Parmigiano-Reggiano achieves through months of maturation. You have the salty, the sweet, the acid,” she says. “And you cannot describe why it is so good. Only that it is just too good.”

So, if you ask me. Is Sardine the New Caviar?

It is a resounding no. Sardines do not need reinvention to prove their worth; they already carry something far more difficult to manufacture: authenticity. They are seasonal, and sometimes they are imperfect. But when they are good, they deliver something that no amount of refinement can replicate.

The proof is in the pudding (or the starter, in this case). Stand by a grill in Lisbon in June and watch the smoke rise. Then order your sardines; they will be served with a sprinkling of rock salt on top and a generous drizzle of olive oil over the bread. Eat it with your hands, there is salt, fat, heat and something that lingers long after. Then wash it down with a cold beer.

Call it umami, if you like. Portugal never needed to.