The hole-in-the-wall chicken shop Chinese tourists are traveling thousands of miles to visit

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 ancient black rotary-dial handset.

While the line for Silva’s chicken stretches down the street, his premises are tiny — a narrow corridor lined with beige tiles and shelves carrying wine, soda bottles, pickle and olive jars and sacks of potatoes. Every corner is stacked with boxes. On the wall there’s a crucifix, an old calendar, a Portuguese flag and a clock.

‘This is a fight’

Silva’s day starts hours before most tourists appear. After 9 a.m., having walked from his nearby home, he answers the door for suppliers dropping off ingredients. Then comes the part that never makes it into social media posts: scrubbing away yesterday’s grease.

“At night I can’t clean, it’s too hot,” he explains. “The grills, the glass, I can’t clean this at night. And at night it’s dark, you can’t see anymore. And I’m tired, very tired.”

He washes filters, swaps them out, and installs new ones, like maintaining a constantly running engine. In between, he trims chickens, seasons them, wipes his hands, answers the phone, and gets greasy all over again. “This is a fight,” he says.

Not long before midday, the grill wakes up, and so do neighborhood appetites. “At 11:30 I start grilling chicken,” he says . “At 11:30 they’re already taking them.” Then come the Chinese tourists.

These days, Silva is ready. Next to the cash register, he keeps a folded sheet of paper covered in numbers and phonetic notes to help him count in Mandarin. “Yi, er, san, si, wu,” he recites — one, two, three, four, five. There are also a few useful words written out by sound: “cao ji,” free-range chicken; “xiexie,” thank you; “là,” spicy.

His rudimentary linguistics keep the line moving and delight people who have traveled halfway around the world to see him in action. When Silva calls out an order number in Mandarin, smiles spread outside. For a moment, they’re not just tourists at a famous spot. They’re people who feel recognized.

Regulars come first

For Portuguese customers, there’s one concession to modern technology: MB WAY, a local mobile payment app. For tourists, it’s cash only, often handed over in 200-euro bills carried straight from the airport. When Silva can’t make change, the line usually takes care of it.

He has considered adding other payment methods, but says his accountant advises against it. His customers, he insists, aren’t put off.

“The secret is really the way you treat people,” he says. That means sticking to a strict order: regulars come first, and anyone who ordered ahead is served immediately, even if the door is packed with tourists holding phones aloft.

“If you ordered, you can come here and it can be full of Chinese people, I will give it to you right away. They wait.” And they do — excited groups, faces pressed to the glass, laughing, filming. “Yesterday, there were about 12 girls,” Silva says. “I counted them myself.”

The ingredients matter, too. “Fresh chickens. Every day, fresh chickens. Never leftovers,” he says.

That commitment can cost him. Silva recalls a time when a customer pre-ordered a chicken for a specific time, so he cooked it and set it aside — but the customer never came back to collect or pay. Silva absorbed the loss, and by the end of the day the chicken couldn’t be carried over to the next day.

Later, after he had sold out of the day’s remaining chickens, another customer asked if there was any chicken left. Silva handed over that uncollected chicken instead — and waved the money away.

It’s a small detail in a busy shop, and easy to miss on a phone screen video. But it helps explain why people keep coming back — and why the line outside the green door is constantly replenished.

Then there’s the seasoning — a recipe he perfected years ago and won’t reveal.

“I made this seasoning and that was it. I never touched it again,” he says. “It’s been the same since ’79, ’80.” Time is also a factor. He prepares the chickens well in advance, letting the flavors permeate before they’re woken on the grill. “The advantage is I season it from one day to the next,” he says. “The lunch ones are always longer in the seasoning.”

He also uses piri-piri, a Portuguese chili sauce. It isn’t homemade, but he’s relied on the same supplier for 40 years.

The ‘grandpa’ who grills chicken

As Silva works, smoldering charcoal settles into the grill with a dry hiss, the smoke shifting briefly as if the shop is taking a deeper breath. Chickens lie over the heat, their skins crackling. Fat drips down, feeding the smoke. He sets down his tongs and picks up a small sauce pot, brushing the skins until they turn glossy. More charcoal follows — nudged into place, fanned into life, the meat turned again.

At 5:30 p.m., Silva looks out as if reading the street. “Around six, they start to arrive,” he says. By 6 p.m., the line is pressed against the window. The shop glows from within, smoke on the glass acting like a filter. Phone cameras roll, filming scenes already familiar from their screens back home.

Most Chinese visitors come after seeing posts on Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, a TikTok-style Chinese social media platform that many travelers use as a guide.

Among the latest are a couple who call themselves Tony and Elena. They know little about Silva’s churrasqueira beyond its location and the need to bring cash. Despite having the budget for Michelin-level dining, they say they prefer travel centered on authentic local food. “We don’t care if it’s fancy or if it’s poor. If the food is good, it’s great,” they say.

Another visitor, Wang, lives in Barcelona and is vacationing in Lisbon with his wife and three daughters. It’s his second visit to Travessa da Tapada, following an initial recommendation from RedNote. He liked it enough to come back.

“We had tried this chicken before … It went well,” he says. It isn’t just grilled meat, he adds, but “how it’s seasoned and the final flavor that stays.” There’s also a sense of familiarity. “There are seasonings that, for us, feel familiar.”

Vince and Alice, a Chinese couple who live in the United States, were also led here by RedNote. “If you search, for example, ‘grilled chicken’ …” Vince says, pointing to the app on his phone. “This shows up at the top.”

The reviews are uniformly positive and, as Alice notes, include an AI-generated summary describing the venue’s character and the “grandpa” who grills chicken inside.

Li Mei, from Shanghai, is visiting on her second day in Lisbon. She said she didn’t come because of RedNote, but because of a colleague’s recommendation. “You go, you bring cash, you wait a bit, you eat by the door,” her co-worker told her. She was sold.

When Li returns to Shanghai, she’ll pass along the same advice: “There’s grilled chicken in a tiny place in Lisbon, you have to go.”

The recommendation travels hand to hand, like the white bag stamped with a rooster — still warm, still smoking.

At the center of it all, Silva keeps going. Sometimes he runs out of chickens, despite his best efforts to serve everyone who makes the journey to his door. On Sundays, he can sell out early, especially if a delivery fails to arrive, forcing him to forage through neighborhood supermarkets to keep chickens on the grill.

But the grills won’t burn forever. Silva has other plans. “In May I’m going to retire,” he says. His two sons don’t want to take over the shop. One lives abroad and plays in an orchestra. The other runs his own business in Portugal.

When Silva finally lets the embers go out for the last time, the aroma of roasting chickens that traveled halfway around the world may vanish with them.

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