and delicious. why do you think portuguese food has not had a higher profile internationally? ricardo: well, for me it s real easy for me to say this, it s basically it s your fault. anthony: our fault!? ricardo: it s america s fault, yeah. anthony: why? ricardo: the american culture embraced spain, and embraced italy, and embraces france. it didn t embrace portugal because i don t know. if we have a civil war so popular like the spanish had and hemingway came to portugal instead of spain then we d be a different country. anthony: you know you think of italy, you think of romance. ricardo: but we are romantic. anthony: i know. ricardo: we are the most romantic country in the world. after a couple of meals in porto, you re going to feel the saudade in your heart and soul. anthony: man, good meal. oh wait, what there s more clams? right over here, my friend.
has it changed too much? jose: ehh, special big cities, especially oporto, it s changed a lot. it was never a tourist town. now it s packed with tourists. anthony: so is that good news or bad news? jose: it s good news, it s good. i mean it s good for the economy, especially if you came up during the financial crisis and all that. so, it was a great help for the city. anthony: i mean it looks even prettier than it looked last time. they seemed to have fixed up a lot of buildings. jose: because this downtown area, historically oporto was completely degraded. old buildings collapsing with the flux of tourist a lot of people invested, and they started fixing it. anthony: so what are we eating here, this is supposed to be a jose: you know actually we re going to start with patinhas, those are small sardines. anthony: you eat everything, the bones, you eat the whole thing. jose: everything.
you can eat 1,000 of them and the plate is empty and that s a good thing nobody can see how many we eat. jose: you ready for the tripes? anthony: yes! jose: ahh, so let s go. the tripes is the iconic dish of oporto. anthony: tripieros right? jose: tripas, that s trip people. anthony: why? jose: there were a couple of stories, the more historical one i guess, henry the navigator at one point he was putting an armada of ships to go ceuta the people from oporto gave them all the meat they had. anthony: so they were left with just the tripe. cheap food for the sailors, that would last a long time. jose: usually it s on thursday, that s the day with the tripes. because being a catholic country on friday they skip the meat. anthony: a meal here is, generally speaking anyway, not light. the portuguese like pork, they like it a lot. anthony: so sausage, bacon jose: sausage, pigs ear anthony: cured pigs ear. what do you do when left with nothing but guts and hooves
oh man, had to call the crisis center. anthony: 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 they went to sea in great numbers, gained fame as navigators, ship builders, 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 i reached out to jose de meirelles, my old boss and first entrée to portugal. anthony: you re good? jose: it s nice to see you. anthony: it s been a long, long time. anthony: jose is from the area around oporto, and this time just like back then he said come see my country, and meet my family. we ll do a pig feast. anthony: 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, gorgeous.