By Tiago Palma, CNN
Lisbon (CNN) — In a city of beautiful streets, Lisbon’s Travessa da Tapada is easy to miss. Lined by parked cars, it’s a short run of apartment buildings linking busier thoroughfares, soundtracked by the rumble of traffic from the nearby elevated A2 highway.
And yet, each day, a steady parade of tourists — many of whom have traveled thousands of miles from China — makes its way to one unmarked address: number 5A.
Behind a green door with no sign above it, António Silva, 66, works alone in a tiny Portuguese churrasqueira — a no-frills charcoal-grill shop best known for one thing: roast chicken. Inside, he tends a bed of glowing embers, turning spatchcocked birds over the heat while the phone rings for orders. The smoke drifts towards the glass and stays there, lingering in the storefront window like a memory.
On a recent winter day, visitors lined up outside the blank storefront, dressed in quilted coats with furry hoods, cellphones ready to capture photos and videos for social media. They were there to film the scene through the fogged window — Silva’s hands, the grill, the chickens — and then to taste what comes out in a white paper bag printed with cartoon roosters, still steaming in the cold.
The chicken tastes smoky first — charcoal on the skin — then salty and gently sweet from the seasoning, with meat that stays remarkably juicy under the crackle. Piri-piri seasoning cuts through with a bright, lingering heat, the kind that builds rather than burns.
Travessa da Tapada hasn’t always been a tourist stop. Silva has been roasting meat in this backstreet shop for decades, and until recently it was a secret known mainly to locals in Lisbon’s Alcântara district. There’s no sign on the street — just the door number, 5A — and the daily rhythm hasn’t changed much since he began.
Then, somehow, the address found its way onto Chinese-language “you have to go” lists — and the line began.
Word of mouth
It started, Silva says, about two years ago. He couldn’t recall the exact date, only a “before” and an “after.” First came one Chinese customer. The next day, another. Then another, and another, until he realized the shop’s clientele had almost completely shifted.
“I only noticed it like that,” he says. The line grew slowly and, at some point, stopped being a line and became a wave. “Sometimes I have 40 Chinese people at the door. I saw 40, believe it if you want.”
One day, he says, a man arrived with a video camera and spent hours filming the shop inside and out, from every available angle. “He was there a long time,” Silva says, glancing around his shop as he recalled the visit. “Maybe a Chinese influencer. I don’t know.” Not long after, this small backstreet became a dot on an international map.
“Word of mouth for millions and millions of people,” he says.
These days, visitors often arrive with suitcases in tow, straight from the airport. Others come from their hotels, concierges dialed in on their phones to help guide them. Once inside, many use translator apps — often to tell Silva something he already knows. “You’re very famous in China.”
If he’s impressed by the reputation, Silva doesn’t show it. He isn’t on social media himself. “Not Facebook, not Instagram. I’ve got nothing,” he says. There are no delivery-platform orders here, either. Requests come by phone, often through the shop’s ancie