The Portuguese Grill

The national flag of Portugal

The common wisdom has it, quoting the great southern novelist Thomas Wolfe, “You can't go home again.” While it is true, every once in a while you find yourself in an unexpected and nostalgic place where a wisp of a long forgotten aroma brings back memories, old deep memories. That happened to me not long ago and an improbable place, a small shopping center next to an Albertson and a Shell Station in Rancho Cucamonga, about fifty years and four hundred miles south of the memories it evoked. The place was a small family owned and run restaurant. As often can happen especially with ethnic food, these little places prepare and bring us fair and accurately served food from the family’s oldest traditions.

The regional flag of the Açores

The restaurant I writing about is the Portuguese Grill. For me it was stepping back fifty years to the kitchens of my Grandmother and her sisters and sisters-in-laws. This is not the sort of cooking you would find in a hip or contemporary restaurant, it is cooking you would find in a traditional Portuguese home, something that was all around and familiar when I was young, but only makes a reappearance occasionally at large family gatherings that only happen once or twice a year.

Whole dried cod orBacalhau or Lutefisk

This welcoming small brightly tiled little restaurant and take out is decorated with big color pictures of contemporary Portugal and has on the wall both the Green and Red Portuguese national flag and the blue and white regional flag of the Açores islands -- the ancestral homeland of most Portuguese Americans. They have an oak and hard wood fire grill and make a full range of very good and authentic home style dishes. Right off the bat, the starters are familiar and welcoming: Croquettes of potato, herbs and salt cod. Bacalhau is the word for salt cod, what Norwegians call Lutefisk. You can sometimes see and smell it, or at least you used to see it, in ethnic markets, three foot long whole salty white stiff bacalau piled up like firewood. It is traditional in Italy, France, Iberia and the Americas including the English speaking West Indies. It is the ancient staple of Portugal, where it is often called “our old friend.”

Additionally they have fresh small and medium size sardines and mackerel. They are served deep fried and eaten whole. The large sardines and the mackerel are grilled on the oak coals and dressed lightly with olive oil and vinegar with slices of onion and a few herbs. They make linguiça sandwiches which are knock outs: the linguiça is grilled and served in a homemade roll with sautéed peppers and onions. The linguiça is made in Tracy by people from the Açores. It is a sausage of relatively large chunks of pork first marinated then spiced and stuffed in natural casings and finally smoked. It is a cousin of Basque Chorizo, Cajun Andouille and Mexican or Filipino Lorganitza. It is not the stuff sold in super markets, where standard pork sausages are manufactured by adding the approximate ethnic herb & spice mix to a common pork base and then called kilbasa, bratwurst, Italian sausage, chorizo or Louisiana Hot's even though they are really all but identical.

The main menu features fish, chicken, pork, beef and linguiça grilled on the oak coals. The live fire grill is an unusual barbecue system, it has rotating double grills which mean that the meat and fish are barbecued while moving constantly as if they were on a spit. This allows an even cooking and permits the kitchen to barbecue even small delicate fish that would be quickly incinerated on a normal grill. The beef is marinated in red wine vinegar herbs and spices and grilled. The skirt steak was rare, tender as prime cut and came with a big pile of crisp home make fries. It scored 11 on a 10 point scale. Amazing. The grilled chicken was tangy, crisp on the outside and moist inside. The pork ribs were perfect and not coated with some gooey sweet sauce.

They also make an dressy Lisbon style steak topped with a sauce of the pan juices deglased and enriched with cream and brandy and a sunny side up egg -- something very like the dressed up steaks of Argentina and Chile. As you expect there are a number of main dishes based on salt cod that are loved by the Portuguese and worth a try if you are not connected to Lusitanian cooking. Finally they offer a rare specialty, Polvo Estufado, a flavorful and unusual octopus stew which is worth the trip to Cucamonga if you know it. It is a very rarely found Portuguese favorite. If you are frightened off, I should refer you to Anthony Bourdain who is a fan of this dish ever since he first tasted it as a teenager in little Portuguese places on Cape Cod.

They offer a short but balanced list of Portuguese reds and white and rose wines. All are priced very fairly priced and combine seamlessly with their food. The reds are very fruity and rich in the unique local tradition. Finally, the family that owns and run this wonderful little place make bread, bread as you would only find at home. The loaves are about ten inches round and six inches tall with a dark semi crisp crust. Cut in slices the bread is yeasty, chewy and so authentic it almost brought tears to my eyes. After a meal here you can almost hear the words and melody of “In a Portuguese House.”

Portuguese Grill 11368 Kenyon Way # G

Rancho Cucamonga, CA, 91701

Phone : 909-945-9444

 http://www.portuguesegrillrestaurant.com/

It is just off the Foothill Freeway west of the junction with I-15. The web site has easy to follow maps.