Chances are you’ve never even heard of percebes, or gooseneck barnacles as we call them in English. If you have, you’ve probably not tasted them. Neither had we. But in our second layover in Lisbon – only 15 hours – we tried to track down this rare seafood, not least for its fascinating appearance.
The Provenance of Percebes
Percebes are crustaceans, barnacles that grow deep undersea, usually in places with serious wave action. That is one of the things that makes them so expensive. They’re not plentiful, and harvesting them brings with it some danger. A kilo will run you somewhere between €100 and €200. They live in the eastern Atlantic, from England (occasionally) through France and down to Cabo Verde. It’s really the Portuguese and Spanish who like them, though, so that’s where you’ll find them, in fancy seafood restaurants. We saw them on several menus in Cabo Verde too. But nobody ever had them – so by the time we’d spent a month there we were thoroughly intrigued…
We Very Nearly Track them Down
To eat our percebes, we went to Nunes Real Marisqueira, a well-known seafood restaurant near the also well-known Torre de Belém. We discovered this place through internet research, but our cab drivers there and back were impressed by it, so we felt pretty good about ourselves. And it was a stunner, a beautiful Art Deco-style place with profoundly attentive wait staff and a relaxed vibe.
It turned out that this was, maybe, the second-classiest meal of our lives (see here for Lysverket, the classiest). Our original plan was to try a small order of percebes, just in case we didn’t like them so well. They are reputed to taste like a cross between lobster and clam, though, so we were feeling optimistic that we’d be perfectly happy. But alas, serious storms off the coast prevented the percebes-hunters from bring any in, said our waiter. Sigh. These things really are hard to track down, it turns out.
But Have to Comfort Ourselves with an Ocean of Other Delights
So we ordered the ‘mixed seafood platter for two’. Which was really designed for five. There followed a procedure very similar to that in operating rooms, at least as seen on TV: we were washed and prepped; surgical bibs were put around our necks. Then the instruments arrived (pictured below). Note not only the things you might have seen before, like the oyster fork and the crab pick, but the forceps and the whole apparatus off to the right, which is a needle for murex-extraction, and the tile on which you bang the murex to make sure it comes fully out of hiding. We’re not going to lie: this was an intimidating array. But we refused to give in to the pressure, and once the nurse wiped our foreheads once or twice, we dove right in.
Still, we struggled manfully with the lobster and crab and murex and oysters and clams and four different kinds of shrimp. Or maybe five; it was hard to concentrate with all of those beady-eyed crustaceans looking at us. In any case, we did get to try the Mediterranean murex, which we’d also been keen on (not least to see if we could crush the shells to make ourselves some Tyrian purple, but no luck there). The murex were our least favourite of the seafood, actually, but there were so many amazing things there that you shouldn’t hold that against them. They were not so different from snails, and we liked them just fine.
Shockingly, we were not able to finish our dinner. This has happened to us, so far, a joint total of one time to date. Still, we made a valiant effort. And not to worry, friends: we will track down the elusive percebes, someday, somehow!
