27 December - A perfect night out

After some quiet days at home, we were off to London for a show.  I researched restaurants in the vicinity of the theatre and came up with Bar Douro, a restaurant that specializes in Portuguese food and wine.  Being from the New Bedford area, I’m well acquainted with Portuguese specialties and hoped this would be a good choice.  We took the train to Waterloo station, then the tube to London Bridge.  From there it took under ten minutes to walk to the restaurant.  Bar Douro is a charming jewel box of a place. It’s built into one of the arches of the train tracks, and is very small with a few tables upstairs but only stools and counters on the ground floor. The kitchen is postage stamp sized.

We were seated in front of the tiny area where the staff mixes a small selection of specialty cocktails and pours the wine. This was great because all evening we got to chat with the waitstaff.  Our waiter was from Lisbon and made some great recommendations.  We started with cocktails, an Alentejo gin & tonic for Bruce, complete with coriander seeds floating on top, and a Madeira old fashioned for me. This old fashioned was made with aged rum instead of whiskey, and combination of that and the Madeira worked a treat. We ordered a snack of Croquetes de alheira, smoked Portuguese sausage croquetes.  These took me right back to my youth, the wonderful chorizo reminding me of the linguica pizzas I used to order from Riccardi’s Pizza on Hathaway road. (Talk about a specific memory) They sat on a little dollop of lemon accented mayonnaise and were served on a Portuguese tile.

The menu is divided into snacks and sharing plates and it was devilishly difficult to pick just four sharing plates.  The first one to come out was Bacalhau à Brás, salt cod hash.  This reminded me of a dish I had in Brazil.  It was light and flavorful without being overly salty.

Next came Bruce’s favorite, garlic prawns, which were enormous! Heads and tails left on, they were in a tomato-garlic-cream sauce.

Next up was Bife à Marrare, onglet steak in a mustard sauce.  I had a small piece of it and found the steak to be somewhat flavorless, though that may be because the sauce was so assertive.

Last out of the kitchen was Duck Rice with Chorizo, which was light and fluffy with bits of confit duck and a a tiny dice of sausage. 

We each tried a different wine: a Bojador Vinho de Talha Tinto for me and a Churchill’s Estate Grafite from the Douro for Bruce. Mine had the lightness of a Beaujolais with lovely fruit and balanced acidity. Bruce’s was a much more concentrated, full-bodied wine with some nice tannins.

We had both had enough to eat, but how can you turn down a Pastel de Nata with Cinnamon ice cream? 

I enjoyed a young Madiera with it, Bruce chose a Ginjinha spritz, which is made with a Ginjinha de Marvão (cherry) licor and a hint of Espírito de Floresta, a botanical liqueur which is imported from Portugal by the owner.  The bartender said that you can’t get it anywhere in London, which only made me want it more. They also make a fennel liqueur, which sounds interesting.

Anyway, completely sated, we made the three minute walk to the Menier Chocolate Factory, a very small theatre on the sight of (surprise, surprise) an old chocolate factory, to see Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. 

The show lasted for 193 performances on Broadway and hasn’t been frequently revived like many other of his shows.  The focus of the show is Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s 1853 mission to open trade relations with isolationist Japan, through what was known as “gunboat diplomacy.” It is viewed through the eyes of the Japanese, not the westerners, and created a bit of controversy in that the writers were two New Yorkers with no lived experience of Japanese culture. If I was a bit wary going into the theatre, I was elated coming out.  The traverse stage worked perfectly for the story, giving a sense of movement both geographically and temporally. The minimalistic set served the space well – I especially liked the skeletal shoji screens and the gold-leafed arches representing everything from arched passages to ocean waves.

(Photo credit: Manuel Harlan)

The co-production with Osaka’s Umeda Arts Theatre was directed by Matthew White with gorgeous, and sometimes very funny, costumes by Ayako Maeda and glorious choreography by Ashley Nottingham. The cast was superb, not a weak link anywhere. I found the casting of men in women’s roles, women in men’s roles, Caucasians playing Asians, Asians playing Caucasians, somehow perfect and perfectly modern when viewed against the show’s themes of fear of assimilation, brutality and cultural purity.  I wish all my theatre loving friends could see this production; it was extraordinary

On the walk home, we passed the Shard, all dressed up in its holiday lights. A perfect evening.