antonio's

I mentioned telling Miss Shirley about the museum over lunch. That lunch gets a blog post all its own, 'cause it was awwwwesoooooome.

I was walking past the library at work a day or two before our road trip when I thought, hey, I should find a guidebook on New England. The New Bedford entry had two restaurants - one downtown and one somewhere else that was supposed to have good Portuguese food. So when we were in New Bedford looking for lunch, we plugged the Portuguese restaurant, Antonio's, into the GPS and drove over.

And wow, the guidebook did not lie. It was darn good Portuguese food. I got "Madeiran Scabbard Fish" - I had no idea what scabbard fish was, but it was on the specials list and the waitress said it had bones in it, which makes fish more fun to eat. It was in some buttery sauce with beautiful boiled potatoes. They were so potatoey. Miss Shirley got a skewer thing with shrimp and beef and scallops and deliciousness. The whole thing, with cod fritter appetizers, was about $30 for the two of us.

The Portuguese came to New Bedford because of the whaling (and, later, fishing). When I was on Cape Cod in the summer of 2005, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Brazilians who told me that there are tons of Brazilians around there, too - they work in all the restaurant kitchens. Oh gosh, and speaking of amazing meals, they took me to one of those Brazilian restaurants where guys walk around with skewers of meat, offering to cut bits off for you. I ate an astounding quantity of meat and drank about three caipirinhas. I did not think this would go over well with my stomach. But I was wrong: not only was I not sick, I was so well fed that I wasn't even hungry again until breakfast two days later. (I ate a little at mealtimes because it seemed like a good idea, but I wasn't hungry.)