Original subtitles

♪ I took a walk through this ♪

♪ Beautiful world

♪ Felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪

♪ Found something good in this ♪

♪ Beautiful world

♪ I felt the rain getting colder ♪

- ♪ La, la - ♪ Sha la, la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la

- ♪ Sha la, la, la - Sha la, la, la, la ♪

♪ Sha la, la, la, la, la

♪

Everything old is new again.

Maybe not.

I come close sometimes to believing

that nothing actually ever changes.

♪

Back in the beginning, fresh out of the kitchen,

when I first went out in the world

trying to figure out how to make television,

I came to Northern Portugal.

Little did I know what I would find.

Up until then,

for 30 years spent working in kitchens,

meat had come wrapped in plastic.

I'd order it in boxes.

I had never seen an animal die

because I was making dinner.

Ooh.

♪

Hi. How are you guys doing?

Oh, man, they can be so cruel.

All right, ciao.

Oh, man. Oof.

I had to call the crisis center.

♪

♪

Portugal, sandwiched between Spain and the Atlantic Ocean,

and tiny as countries go,

has had an outsized impact on the world.

During the Age of Discovery,

the Portuguese went to sea in great numbers,

and gained fame as navigators, ship builders, and explorers.

They conquered a large part of the world,

their empire stretching from Brazil,

to Africa, to the East Indies.

The city of Oporto is a reflection

and a creation of that relationship with the sea.

A lot has changed since I was last here.

Or has it?

♪

♪

When I decided to return

to take another look at this place,

I, of course, reached out to Jose de Meirelles,

my old boss and first entre to Portugal.

How you doing, man?

- You look good. - You good?

- Yeah, nice to see you. - It's been a long, long time.

Jose is from the area around Oporto,

and this time, just like back then,

he said "Come, see my country, meet my family."

We'll do a pig feast."

16 years later.

I came here in 2001, one of the first times

I've ever been on television, and here we are again.

There are only so many beautiful places left in the world.

Oporto is one of them. It's gorgeous.

Has it changed too much?

Eh, yes, especially in the big cities.

Especially Oporto, it change a lot.

It was never too rich town.

Now it's packed with tourists.

So that's... is that good news or bad news?

- Yeah, it's good news. - Good news.

I mean, it's good for the economy,

and especially it came up

during the big financial crisis and all that.

So it was a great job for the city.

I mean, it looks even prettier than it looked last time.

They seem to have fixed up a lot of buildings.

So what are we eating here? It's the specialty?

Oh, actually we're gonna start with [indistinct].

That's small sardines.

♪

You eat everything. The bones. You eat the whole thing.

You can eat a thousand of them,

and the plate is empty so that's a good thing.

Nobody can tell you how many you eat.

You ready for the tripes?

- Yes. - Absolutely, let's go.

- Tripeiros, right? - Tripas.

We are known as the tripas, that's tripe people.

Why?

Right.

The people from Oporto gave them all the meat they had.

- So they... - All they're left with...

Just with the tripes.

It's cheap food for the sailors.

It would last a long time.

And it usually is on Thursday.

That's the day with the tripes,

because being a Catholic country,

on Friday, they skip the meat.

♪

A meal here is, generally speaking anyway, not light.

The Portuguese like pork.

They like it a lot.

So sausage, bacon.

- Sausage, pig's ear. - Cured pig's ear.

What do you do when left with nothing

but guts and hooves and odd bits?

You have the tripes here, some beans.

Figure out how to transform that

into delicious, delicious things, of course.

♪

Oh, wow, look at that.

Oh, that's fantastic.

- It smells delicious. - Perfect. Yes, it does.

So I put a little rice on the side there to mop it up?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

♪

Mmm.

That is good.

♪

♪

Mmm.

I mean, it's sort of incredible the story of the wines here.

I hear that because the soil

is so tough with flint and stones also,

the vines have to dig up to 30 meters down.

But it's a lot.

I think it gives the wine a special character.

♪

Northern Portugal's Douro Valley

is where Port comes from.

♪

If it's not from here, it's not Port.

It's just fortified wine.

♪

I don't usually do wine scenes.

No matter how good the wine, on camera

it's just colored liquid going into a glass.

Wine nerds usually bore me.

Don't talk about your damn wine, drink it.

♪

But I absolutely love cheese served

with a glass of Port wine,

and that's what most people, including my new friend Andre,

that's what they do around here.

I'm not a dessert guy, but a nice blue cheese

with a glass of port, for me, is, like,

the perfect thing to end a meal with.

Unlike wine, cheese porn is easy.

Just like shooting actual porn.

Start with an establishing shot, move in for a close...

Oh, yeah, there we go.

...cut away to a reaction.

Mmm.

Money.

Works every time.

Oh, that's disturbing. I mean, it's delicious.

What kind of cheeses are we looking at here?

These two over here, they're goat cheese.

They're aged ones.

Then all the other are sheep milk.

This is worldly known Queijo Serra,

so the buttery one.

This is what we call a Queijo Azeitao.

It's strong, intense to your palate.

Oh, I like this guy already.

Any cheese that are, like, you need a spoon pretty much.

Oh, then smell it. For me, the worse the smell,

the better the flavor.

- Mmm. - Huh? Like it?

Smells like dirty feet. Tastes like heaven.

This is a 30-year-old Port.

♪

- Oh, that's delicious. - Yeah.

Put a little bit of that

and then some pumpkin jam on top.

Mmm. If I put on my Speedo and dive into this thing,

please stop me before I completely face plant.

Oh, no, no, no. I love Portuguese gastronomy.

The heart and soul of it, its simplicity.

Look, that's the thing

that makes me fall in love with it every single day.

Cheese is one of those things, it's always magic to me

because it goes into the cave one way

and then you go in and you pull it out,

and, I don't believe in God,

but somehow it went in like that,

and it came back like this.

Relying on time to cut his way through it and to change this.

Change the texture, even the smell,

and we have nothing to do with that other than enjoying it.

♪

♪

♪

Portugal has got a lot of coastline

and a lot of history with the sea.

It's a close relationship,

one that's imprinted deep within the national character.

The songs. The poetry.

The state of mind.

I love this word, saudade.

♪

Saudade means missing something. Nostalgic.

♪

A word with no direct translation to English.

It connotes longing, being away from something,

and yearning to get back.

The Portuguese went out of the country

for years at sea, and he does not know

when he's gonna get back to his family.

♪

During the cold gray months, it's lamprey season.

Oh, hell yeah.

So I'm here at just the right time.

What do you call this dish in Portuguese?

This is the lamprey eel?

Yeah, the lamprey bordelaise.

Awesome.

Lamprey are butt ugly damn creatures,

but delicious when cooked right,

and my man Pedro knows how to cook it right.

Very traditional. Cooked in its own blood.

Yeah, it's bordelaise style.

When it's bordelaise, it means it has the blood.

Mmm, it's good. Fantastic.

Saudad is going back to a moment

where you're happy.

It doesn't matter if it was through food,

through sex, through wherever.

You're making me sad already thinking about this.

No, but that's not sad.

- I'm getting depressed. - Come on.

Yes, thinking about happy times

that I can't have right now.

But there's a hope in the future

that that's going to happen because that's also part of...

- Yeah, no. - Yeah, I see it like that.

If you don't see it, that's your problem.

The Portuguese were the original navigators.

Yeah.

It was about the sea. About fishing, exploration.

Ah, question. I went to the fish market.

I met these women who sell fish there,

and they were saying terrible, terrible things to me.

They were saying, "Hey, pin dick, get over... you know",

how do you satisfy your wife with that tiny little penis?"

My God, I've never in my life heard women,

anybody speak like this.

This is what I'm gonna get?

Yeah, nasty approaches

about your penis and your height, yeah.

♪

♪

♪

♪

I'm Tony, hi.

- I'm Sophia. - Sophia.

I'm Shanna. Nice to meet you.

- Hi. Good to meet you both. - How are you?

Those of you who know me even a little bit

are familiar with my unholy attraction

to the mutant hot dog.

Is it actually called a hot dog here or is it...

- No, here we call it cachorro. - Cachorro.

Toasted bread. Fresh sausage.

Fresh pork sausage.

And a cheese and a spicy sauce.

And spicy sauce.

♪

And cut in a very specific way.

Wow, look at... Fast knife work.

Nah.

He's asking if you want some fork and knife.

No, we can eat it with the...

No, we don't do that, right?

♪

Mmm. This is delicious.

This is very healthy too.

Yeah, it's a light dinner.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.

No, no, no, yeah, it is.

- They're busy. - Yeah, they're always busy.

- Yeah, always busy. - It's a small place.

And you can see it's just Portuguese, just locals.

How many places like this in town?

Nowadays, not many.

- Now, you guys own a tavern? - Yes.

How's employment in Portugal now?

There's a lot of unemployment here.

No, I was gonna ask,

do you get a lot of people with degrees,

you know, higher degrees who are opening restaurants?

Yes. She has the degree in psychology.

I have the degree in sociology.

And everyone who is working with us they have the degree.

- Yeah, or they are finishing. - Or they are finishing.

I might have to have another.

That was good.

♪

♪

♪

♪

This city seems to have been preserved carefully

and with respect for the past.

I don't see a lot of high rise buildings

breaking up the skyline.

We are still very authentic. We don't sell out very easily.

I mean, I was in a relatively poor

neighborhood a couple of nights ago

just walking around, and somebody said,

"You know, you could buy that apartment building

right there for $50,000."

I said, "Okay, good deal."

"But you can't touch the exterior."

Yeah, no.

This is the fishing and port area of Oporto, yes?

And it's called Matosinhos.

The fishing boats just arrived,

and the market is just two streets away from here.

♪

- Okay. - Oh, my God.

Seafood tower, bitches. All right then.

Okay, not a tower precisely,

but a whole heap of incredible creatures from the sea.

♪

Coastal shrimp.

Local oysters

and crab.

Sea urchin.

Langoustine. Gooseneck barnacles.

This I'm very excited by.

- Yeah. - So dangerous to get these.

Yeah, it's not the thing that you get

from the hulls of the boats, but from rocks.

And you've got to get it in between waves.

- Mm-hmm. - Quickly. Whelks?

- Caramujos. - Caramujos.

Oh, there we go.

Mmm. Insane.

One thing that I don't like with food is sauce.

Yeah, I don't need it. This is all perfect.

What do they do to it? They steamed it, some of it.

- Yeah. - The rest is raw.

It's not like this is fancy cooking.

♪

Mmm. This crab is...

It's like a Rubik's cube.

I'm trying to figure my way into here.

Okay, I found it.

♪

This is the thing that gets you back to your roots.

You have to use your hands. You don't have to be polite.

Yeah.

♪

Mmm, these little shrimp.

The brains are really good too.

♪

Oh, look at that.

Sea urchin, fat sacks of roe

buried deep inside these prickly exteriors.

When I was a kid, I went with my father to get these,

and it was nasty, but also very good.

Mmm.

It's funny, a lot of things

that you see here were used as fertilizer.

In the years before independence in Massachusetts,

Lobster was seen as a pest.

The only people who used them regularly

was the prison system.

The prisoners rioted because they said this is cruel

and unusual punishment having to eat lobster every day.

"No, I don't want that. It's lobster."

♪

Nobody knows who first salt-baked a fish.

Maybe it was Jesus.

- Ohhh. - Oh, wow.

Scale and gut your fish, in this case a sea bass,

insert lemon and onion,

then pack it in salt and bake.

♪

Light the whole thing on fire tableside,

then break open.

The salt acts like a protective crust,

sealing in all the moisture and flavor.

Now, that looks beautiful. That's perfect food.

Mmm.

Clams cooked Portuguese style.

- Yeah. - So tender and sweet

and delicious.

Why do you think Portuguese food

has not had a higher profile internationally?

Well, for me it's real easy to say this,

it's basically... It's your fault.

- Our fault? - It's the Americans' fault.

Yeah. Why?

The American culture embraced Spain.

It embraced Italy. It embraced France.

It didn't embrace Portugal because... I don't know.

If we have a civil war

so popular like the Spanish had,

and Hemmingway came to Portugal instead of Spain,

we would be a different country.

You know, you think of Italy, you think of romance.

- No, but we are romantic. - I know. These people...

We are the most romantic country in the world.

After you have a couple of meals in Porto,

you're going to feel saudade in your heart and soul.

Man, good meal. Oh, what, there's more clams?

Right over here, my friend.

♪

♪

Contrary to what some might say,

I do not enjoy seeing the death of any living thing.

I do not promote animal cruelty.

♪

- Yeah, ready to go? - Yep.

Kill the pig, kill the pig, kill the pig.

But I think people should know where meat comes from,

and knowing, they should feel free to decide

what they want to do from there.

- It's the least you could do. - Yeah, exactly, so...

Here, right here on Jose's family farm,

is where I saw my first animal die.

A pig too.

This, after years and decades

of being a chef, serving meat,

ordering up my death over the phone

at a comfortable distance.

Up close, it was not so comfortable.

I think he's starting to get the bad news.

I guess on the DNA, they know that's gonna happen and...

They know it's coming.

- Really they know it's coming. - Yeah, well the pigs are smart.

And sometimes they manage to run away.

To do the job right, professionals are brought in,

and they do it like this because,

how shall I put it, they need the heart

to keep pumping the blood into the pail

for sausage and soup,

and many delicious things.

We all come to this in the end,

whether struggling for air in our beds,

bleeding out on cold concrete,

a last mighty dump like Elvis,

or this.

Oh, yeah, it's a firecracker.

That's the start of any festivities in Portugal,

is the firecracker. Really?

As befitting tradition and the way things are done,

this is a once in a year event.

For two days, extended family,

friends and neighbors gather to cook,

cure and eat a pig.

Time for a haircut? Yeah, haircut.

- Old-school. - Yeah.

♪

They finish up with the blowtorch.

- As one must. - Yeah.

It's like rappers.

Yeah, yeah, that's it, that's it.

Free style.

Up.

Up. There you go.

So now they gonna finish up and take all the guts out...

Take all the guts out, and that is lunch.

Lunch time.

In Portugal, we used to say

that if we want to know our body,

you have to kill a pig because it's absolutely the same.

All the organs are placed on the same disposition.

I see a liver there and the heart,

and you have the tongue there too.

That's all in a package, all the good stuff.

Look, it's a lung.

♪

He's good.

Yeah, he really knows what he's doing.

I would say a surgeon, but he's faster than a surgeon.

♪

Guts removed, the liver and heart are used today.

Cooked immediately.

Oh, this is the best, the heart.

- It's like a tender sirloin. - Oh, it's so good.

It's so good, yeah.

The intestines washed

and reserved for sausage casing.

Mmm. Looks nice.

The rest is left to hang until tomorrow,

when we shall feast again.

- Ah, it's like chicharron. - Chicharron.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh. That's kind of perfect.

Mmm. That's good.

Not all of the countries eat all of the meat

off of the pork.

And here, we eat everything.

- They don't waste anything. - Anything.

♪

Fado, the national music of Portugal.

Songs of longing, heartbreak,

saudade set to music.

♪

Anthony, in Portugal

everybody thinks that they sing Fado.

We, the Portuguese, think that the Fado

is not the perfection,

the ability, the fine-tuning.

It's emotion, so everybody's allowed to sing.

Yeah.

That's why Jose is telling that I sing Fado.

I see.

Normally the guys who sing Fado are very happy guys.

They are very... But when they begin to sing,

they turn into sad guys.

I don't know why.

Well, you said the Portuguese are bipolar.

Yes, yes they are. They are.

So ready to eat, I see, huh? Big enough table?

The home of Jose's ancestors for centuries.

Much of their original estate still in family hands.

Very exciting.

Jose's mother Maria is in charge today.

She's preparing a feast of rustic Portuguese soul food.

They boil the bones out,

then they finish with the blood, so... blood and bread.

- Blood and bread. - Yeah.

Mmm.

Beautiful.

♪

It's so good.

♪

The main event, cozido,

a glorious stew of seemingly every last part of the pig.

I'm gonna give you some of the pernil,

that is the smoked meat.

Spare ribs.

Nothing goes to waste around here.

The blood sausage. Cabbage.

- Oh, what's that? - That's the butelo.

It's the pig's bladder that's stuffed with pork belly,

the spare ribs, and then smoked.

Wow, look at that.

♪

Extraordinary.

♪

And one little thing, you don't feel that guilty

when you eating this because it's only just boiled.

Not fried. Not... Oh, I don't feel guilty.

Oh, it's fantastic. Oh, it's superb.

Wonderful. Thank you.

♪

So, Jose, what's left of the pig?

A couple of hams and not much else.

Well, the everything is on salt right now.

So the shoulders and the legs are in salt?

They're on salt. They're gonna be in salt

for about three months,

and then they're going to be smoked

and they are a prosciutto.

And they are fantastic.

So you spoke about Fado and sadness,

but, you know, after a few drinks,

everybody gets very happy, you know?

Good.

Means, "With wine, happiness."

- Yeah! - Cheers.

- Yeah. - Happiness, happiness.

Thank you.

♪

♪

Cheers.

Now it's time for the francesinha,

which translates as little French girl?

Yeah, yeah.

But I understand she's not so little.

- No, it's not. - No.

It's your first time, francesinha?

- It is. - Really?

You have this look on your face like...

You look worried.

- Good luck. - It's gonna be okay, right?

Oh, here we go.

- Oh, thank you. - What do we got?

Good Lord, look at that thing.

Is there a vegetable in there?

- Only meat. - Oh, my God.

It weighs, like, a ton.

♪

So it's bread, ham...

Mm-hmm.

Steak...

Sausage, and a bit of...

- Linguica. - Yeah, linguica.

♪

And then the sauce has many things like beer,

Port wine, spicy, tomato.

- Cheese. - A lot of cheese. A lot.

Wow.

What a construction.

Meat, cheese, fat and bread? It's the immortal combination.

Yeah, it's the ultimate solution

for a hangover or too much pork.

♪

That is delicious.

Oh, that's good. It's really, really good.

Are there a lot of places making this?

- Mmm. - A lot.

- Yeah. - Everyone does.

And this is a Oporto thing specifically?

- Yes. - Yeah.

What's the relative rate

per capita of heart-related disease in this country?

I'm just curious.

It depends on how many francesinha you had.

Oh, right.

♪

♪

Oh-oh, oh-oh. How are you doing?

No, I don't know. Today? You guys need any fish?

Thank you.

♪

Everything old is new again, maybe not.

I come close sometimes to believing

that nothing actually ever changes,

that we are trapped in our destiny,

hurtling or limping

or being dragged towards the inevitable.

That saudade refers not to a long-lost place,

but a long-lost time

when we were all young and innocent.

Saudade can help you value things.

Be grateful for just a sunset. Enjoy that. Smile.

- Enjoy it now. - Yes.

Because tomorrow we die.

Yeah, you never know.

♪

♪