'My Portugal' is our newsletter series celebrating Portuguese culture through conversations with friends of Portugalia Marketplace. This month, we are highlighting Ricardo Dias Felner, journalist, food critic, and 'The Man Who Ate Everything.'

Ricardo Dias Felner is a journalist and food critic. He has worked for the newspaper Público and the magazine Sábado, where he wrote about politics, justice, immigration, and gastronomy. He was also editor-in-chief of Time Out magazine. He is the author of the book O Homem que Comia Tudo (The Man Who Ate Everything, Quetzal), as well as the television program of the same name, which aired on SIC, Portugal’s national channel. He is currently researching the international communication of Portuguese cuisine as part of his PhD. He writes a weekly column for the newspaper Expresso and hosts the podcast O Homem que Comia Tudo. He teaches journalism writing at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Portugalia Marketplace: You spent years as an investigative journalist before becoming one of Portugal’s most prominent food critics. How did that background in ‘hard news’ shape the way you approach food writing?

Ricardo Dias Felner: I did every kind of journalism. I had the taxi dossier, the immigrants dossier, I did crime, but I also did politics and courts. Doing journalism, whether investigative or not, means that we have a broader view of the world and of life, on the one hand. On the other, it makes us less permeable to particular interests. Good journalists write to inform the reader; they have the reader in mind when they are writing. Their greatest concern is not what Chef A or B, or the public relations person for Restaurant A or B, is going to think — it is whether their information is true, new, interesting, or relevant.

PM: You are familiarly known as ‘The Man Who Ate Everything.’ Where did your passion for culinary discovery come from? What is the one smell or sound from your childhood in Portugal that immediately transports you back to your family kitchen?

RDF: I think the voracity for trying different things comes from curiosity. It is because I want to discover new things that I end up trying things I did not know. And that impulse to risk experimenting, is what leads us to like something new. In my childhood, I did not have that example. My mother is quite conservative when it comes to culinary tastes. Even today she rejects sushi, for example. But she cooks very well, and likes eating very much, especially Portuguese food. I always remember her shepherd’s pie and the platters of French fries that were present at every meal.

PM: You often write about the social and economic factors behind food. What do you see as some of the benefits or harms to Portuguese food culture as Lisbon and Porto become increasingly popular tourist destinations?

RDF: It's worth noting that restaurants in Lisbon improved from around 2010, when the growth of tourism and the arrival of some foreign chefs brought more diversity and other experiences to the city’s kitchens. But today we are witnessing an excess of foreign restaurants, often mediocre, and the disappearance of Portuguese restaurants, pushed out of the city because of the price of rents, inflated by the arrival in the country of foreigners from Northern Europe and the United States, with much greater purchasing power.

PM: You’ve interviewed everyone from Michelin-starred chefs to grandmothers in remote villages. For someone visiting Portugal for the first time, what advice would you give to find a truly authentic meal?

RDF: To eat good Portuguese food, the best thing is to leave the big cities. Portugal has excellent ingredients, but not in the places where there are only supermarkets. In the inland Algarve, where they use onions and potatoes from the mountains. In makeshift beach restaurants, with fresh fish and a charcoal grill. Or else in Trás-os-Montes, to eat a “posta mirandesa” from oxen of native breeds, with horns that look like oboes, or its extraordinary homemade sausages, such as “alheira”, made by ladies who sleep above the pigs they use in the food, fed with the leftovers from the vegetable garden.

PM: Portugalia Marketplace serves as a bridge for the Luso-American community. What are three essential Portuguese ingredients that every expat pantry should have to maintain a connection to Portugal?

RDF: Bacalhau. Bacalhau. And bacalhau. No, I'm joking. Bacalhau, Portuguese cabbage, and olive oil.

PM: How has Portugal’s culinary landscape changed over your career as a food critic, and what excites you most about the modern era of Portuguese cuisine?

RDF: After a period in which Portuguese chefs were trying to imitate the French, then the Spaniards, there is now a new generation of young cooks who look at what their grandmothers used to make and seek to update that recipe book. To me, that seems to be the most interesting path, more than being in the competition for Michelin stars, which have their relevance, but tend to standardize the cuisines of the world by the measure of caviar, foie gras, and tartelettes.

Dona Pimentinha Pimenta Picada

I use this pepper for everything, from seasoning meat in the oven to using it raw on top of a fresh cheese of the requeijão type, or even ricotta.