![]() Cultivate patience.īut the food, when it arrives, is everything. While there are certainly enough waiters, there may not be quite enough people working the grill out back given a couple of lengthy waits. There’s a lot of opening out of stands at the side of each table for trays from the kitchen. ![]() The service has a sweet and solicitous air to it. Uniformed waiters work these tables, vigorously. Around us sits a mixed crowd – suited and booted men who I decide are spies from MI6, a younger set in serious puffas against the cold rippling off the Thames just over the road, a few families. So instead, here I am at last, on the outside terrace at Casa Madeira, beneath umbrellas equipped with heaters that cast a ripe orange glow and then cut out for a minute of gloom, before suddenly reilluminating. ‘Thick taut-skinned lengths arrive in custom-designed terracotta dishes’: chorizo. One of the owners died, the remaining owner sold up, the quality deteriorated and then a fire closed them altogether for a year or two. Back behind the takeaway was a hilarious, windowless restaurant, with a minstrel gallery and kitsch murals where they served ludicrously good value mixed grills, and dishes of clams and thumb-thick prawns. They did a small number of things very well. They did fabulous grilled ribs and chorizo, a denser, meatier version than its Spanish cousin. They did the best piri piri chicken, a spatchcocked wonder of smoky char and chilli and salt. I was once properly addicted to the food served at a grill house on Brixton Hill, originally called the Gallery. ![]() The fact is I love the most familiar bits of the Portuguese repertoire. Needing somewhere by which to mark a particular moment in my life, I book a table for six. They also have a bar a short distance away on South Lambeth Road, the heart of London’s Portuguese community, but this is the mothership. They converted the arches into a trio of businesses. ‘Split open and generously smothered’: grilled prawns and piri piri sauce. If you’ve ever eaten a pastel de nata in London, it probably came from them. Business boomed and by 2005 they had to move to a dedicated production site in Wandsworth. These arches were originally occupied by the Madeira Bakery and Café, which opened in the 1980s and specialises in pastéis de nata, burnished Portuguese tarts in their cups of pure flaky pastry, which always make life better. Still, I’ve eaten some of Madeira’s food. Over the years I have glanced at the tables beneath the umbrellas as I have passed, at clusters of people leaning in over their plates, and thought that it looked like fun. The pavement here, in the shadow of the MI6 building, edges a wide terrace given over to outside dining. It is on my route home from the centre of London: south over Lambeth Bridge, right along Albert Embankment, and there it is tucked into the railway arches under the line from Waterloo. Casa Madeira is one of those restaurants. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The ObserverĬasa Madeira, 46b Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TL (020 7735 0592). ‘If you’ve ever eaten a pastel de nata in London, it probably came from them’: Casa Madeira.
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