Cachorrinho: The Portuguese Hot Dog
Cervejaria Gazela, a beer bar on the hill above the center of Porto, has a slogan boasting that its cachorro is older than the best francesinha. It sounds cheeky - francesinha has been made in the city since 1952, a good decade before Gazela even opened its doors. But the slogan doesn't say "first", it says "best", and put that way, the claim would hold up in court.
Cachorrinho is a small sandwich of Portuguese cuisine: a crusty roll with fresh sausage and melted cheese, pressed on a contact grill, drizzled with a spicy butter sauce and chopped into bites that you wash down with beer.
What Cachorrinho Means and Where to Find It
The word cachorrinho is a diminutive of cachorro, dog - drop the name into a translator and you'll learn you've just ordered a puppy with your beer. Portuguese does have its own word for a hot dog, cachorro-quente, literally hot dog, and this is exactly where the confusion starts: cachorrinho is named like a little hot dog, yet it shares almost nothing with one - no soft bun, no boiled frankfurter, no mustard. When one Brazilian website introduced the Porto sandwich to its readers, it felt the need to stress that it has nothing whatsoever to do with their cachorro-quente.
For such a young dish, the geography is unusually clear-cut: cachorrinho is a purely Porto thing - it reached Lisbon only recently, where places sell it quite openly as an import, "Porto style", and anywhere else in Portugal you will look for it in vain. In its home city, though, it has more famous siblings: bifana, slices of pork fished out of a spicy sauce and into a roll, and francesinha, a layered affair that calls for cutlery, fries and a free afternoon. Next to them, cachorrinho is a snack to go with beer - and it doesn't pretend to be anything more.
Who Invented Cachorrinho and Who Made It Famous
Gazela opened in 1962 a few steps from the city theater and cachorrinho has been coming off its grill since the very first days; nobody wrote down when exactly someone pressed the first one, so the history of the dish blends into the history of the place. The best chapter, however, wasn't written by the kitchen. A customer saw to that: the chopping into small bites is said to have come from a guest who wanted to eat more slowly - and a concession to one slow eater is now the calling card of the entire genre. Worldwide fame then arrived with Anthony Bourdain, who turned up here in 2017 with a Parts Unknown camera crew. Gazela now goes by the tagline "O Original Cachorrinho" - the original; and so far no other place has argued with that.
Two Sausages in One Roll
Inside there is no frankfurter, but two different fresh sausages side by side - salsicha fresca and linguiça - covered with a slice of queijo flamengo, the Portuguese answer to gouda. The rest is down to the papo seco roll, the grill that presses it crisp, and the spicy butter sauce - Gazela keeps the exact recipe to itself and only two people in the place are said to be allowed to mix it. The sausage in a roll we buy at street stands back home relies on mustard and a quick exit; cachorrinho is just as plain a comfort, only built on butter, cheese and the fact that you stay at the counter for a while.
You eat it standing up or from a bar stool, with a toothpick or with your fingers, bite by bite, and you have a small beer with it - Gazela is a cervejaria, a beer bar, after all. Cachorrinho is at its best as a late-night snack: locals stop for one after the theater, after the cinema or on their way back from the bars, and nobody pretends it's dinner. And if you can't find a free stool, a second Gazela stands a hundred and thirty meters away - it opened because one counter could no longer handle the line.
Following Bourdain to Gazela
It wasn't hunger that took me to Gazela (see Where to Eat in Porto), it was Anthony Bourdain: I wanted to walk part of his route through Porto and I started where he filmed - the place still marks his visit with a little shrine. They sat me at the marble counter among nothing but locals, sipping their beer between bites of cachorrinho, and from there I had a front-row seat for the whole show; the fastest act, chopping up the finished sandwich, takes a couple of seconds - stare into your beer and you miss it. The roll crunched, the cheese stretched with every bite and the sauce kicked in with a slight delay - just enough to make you ask for another beer. The portion cost 4 EUR, a small Super Bock in a frosted glass 2 EUR. After that, there was nothing left to do but walk down from Gazela to the Douro, along cobbled steps between rooftops all the way to the Luís I bridge. That view Porto throws in for free.
